Visual cortical plasticity after the termination of the critical period: A review and experimental test

A literature review is presented in which stimulus deprivation amblyopia is discussed. Additionally, the review of literature covers aspects of attentional and motivational effects on stimulus deprivation amblyopia. Although the experimental design originally intended to induce amblyopia in six kittens born June 14, 1992, only two survived to become subjects in the study. The two kittens were monocularly deprived of light stimulation by wearing an opaque contact lens on the right eye during six hours of light exposure per day, five days per week, beginning at four weeks of age. At all other times, including the first four weeks of life, they were kept in the dark. Beginning at eleven weeks of age, the kittens were motivationally trained to recognize grating acuity patterns, and then acuity testing in the non-deprived eye began at twenty-two weeks of age. Reverse occlusion and acuity testing after the critical period, for the purpose of exploring any motivational visual function recovery, began at thirty-seven weeks of age

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead