Architecture, Function, and Assembly of the Mouse Visual System

Abstract

Vision is the sense humans rely on most to navigate the world, make decisions, and perform complex tasks. Understanding how humans see thus represents one of the most fundamental and important goals of neuroscience. The use of the mouse as a model for parsing how vision works at a fundamental level started approximately a decade ago, ushered in by the mouse's convenient size, relatively low cost, and, above all, amenability to genetic perturbations. In the course of that effort, a large cadre of new and powerful tools for in vivo labeling, monitoring, and manipulation of neurons were applied to this species. As a consequence, a significant body of work now exists on the architecture, function, and development of mouse central visual pathways. Excitingly, much of that work includes causal testing of the role of specific cell types and circuits in visual perception and behavior-something rare to find in studies of the visual system of other species. Indeed, one could argue that more information is now available about the mouse visual system than any other sensory system, in any species, including humans. As such, the mouse visual system has become a platform for multilevel analysis of the mammalian central nervous system generally. Here we review the mouse visual system structure, function, and development literature and comment on the similarities and differences between the visual system of this and other model species. We also make it a point to highlight the aspects of mouse visual circuitry that remain opaque and that are in need of additional experimentation to enrich our understanding of how vision works on a broad scale.

Sub‐topographic maps for regionally enhanced analysis of visual space in the mouse retina

“…In recent years, the mouse has emerged as a premiere model for studying various aspects of visual system development, function, and disease at the retinal, subcortical, cortical, and behavioral level (reviewed in: Seabrook, Burbridge, Crair, & Huberman, ). Previous studies described relatively flat distributions in RGC density across the retina when compared to other animals, as well as little or no correlation in soma or dendritic size with eccentricity (Coombs, van der List, Wang, & Chalupa, ; Dräger & Olsen, ; Jeon, Strettoi, & Masland, ; Sun, Li, & He, ).…”

Strict Independence of Parallel and Poly-synaptic Axon-Target Matching during Visual Reflex Circuit Assembly

“…Competition plays a critical role in development of mammalian eye-specific and retinotopic maps (reviewed in Huberman et al, 2008a; Cang and Feldheim, 2013; Seabrook et al, 2017) and in the development of neuromuscular connections (Sanes and Lichtman, 1999; Bonanomi and Pfaff, 2010), but it plays a more limited role in cell-cell specific wiring in the spinal cord (Betley et al, 2009). We sought to understand whether, at the level of axon-whole target matching in the visual brainstem, specific RGC types undergo competition to arrive at their final pattern of parallel connectivity.…”

Systematic Integration of Structural and Functional Data into Multi-Scale Models of Mouse Primary Visual Cortex

“…It is reasonable to assume, for the mouse visual cortex, that both these factors are independent (given the "salt and pepper" arrangement of orientation tuned cells in the mouse (Harris and Mrsic-Flogel, 2013;Seabrook et al, 2017)) and thus the total probability of connection for a cell-class pair is a product of the distance-dependent and preferred-angle-dependent factors (functions of and , respectively):…”