Adaptive Gaze Strategies for Locomotion with Constricted Visual Field

In retinitis pigmentosa (RP), loss of peripheral visual field accounts for most difficulties encountered in visuo-motor coordination during locomotion. The purpose of this study was to accurately assess the impact of peripheral visual field loss on gaze strategies during locomotion, and identify compensatory mechanisms. Nine RP subjects presenting a central visual field limited to 10–25° in diameter, and nine healthy subjects were asked to walk in one of three directions—straight ahead to a visual target, leftward and rightward through a door frame, with or without obstacle on the way. Whole body kinematics were recorded by motion capture, and gaze direction in space was reconstructed using an eye-tracker. Changes in gaze strategies were identified in RP subjects, including extensive exploration prior to walking, frequent fixations of the ground (even knowing no obstacle was present), of door edges, essentially of the proximal one, of obstacle edge/corner, and alternating door edges fixations when approaching the door. This was associated with more frequent, sometimes larger rapid-eye-movements, larger movements, and forward tilting of the head. Despite the visual handicap, the trajectory geometry was identical between groups, with a small decrease in walking speed in RPs. These findings identify the adaptive changes in sensory-motor coordination, in order to ensure visual awareness of the surrounding, detect changes in spatial configuration, collect information for self-motion, update the postural reference frame, and update egocentric distances to environmental objects. They are of crucial importance for the design of optimized rehabilitation procedures

Translational Retinal Research and Therapies.

The following review summarizes the state of the art in representative aspects of gene therapy/translational medicine and evolves from a symposium held at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania on November 16, 2017 honoring Dr. Gustavo Aguirre, recipient of ARVO's 2017 Proctor Medal. Focusing on the retina, speakers highlighted current work on moving therapies for inherited retinal degenerative diseases from the laboratory bench to the clinic

PromAn: an integrated knowledge-based web server dedicated to promoter analysis

PromAn is a modular web-based tool dedicated to promoter analysis that integrates distinct complementary databases, methods and programs. PromAn provides automatic analysis of a genomic region with minimal prior knowledge of the genomic sequence. Prediction programs and experimental databases are combined to locate the transcription start site (TSS) and the promoter region within a large genomic input sequence. Transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) can be predicted using several public databases and user-defined motifs. Also, a phylogenetic footprinting strategy, combining multiple alignment of large genomic sequences and assignment of various scores reflecting the evolutionary selection pressure, allows for evaluation and ranking of TFBS predictions. PromAn results can be displayed in an interactive graphical user interface, PromAnGUI. It integrates all of this information to highlight active promoter regions, to identify among the huge number of TFBS predictions those which are the most likely to be potentially functional and to facilitate user refined analysis. Such an integrative approach is essential in the face of a growing number of tools dedicated to promoter analysis in order to propose hypotheses to direct further experimental validations. PromAn is publicly available at http://bips.u-strasbg.fr/PromA

PromAn: an integrated knowledge-based web server dedicated to promoter analysis

PromAn is a modular web-based tool dedicated to promoter analysis that integrates distinct complementary databases, methods and programs. PromAn provides automatic analysis of a genomic region with minimal prior knowledge of the genomic sequence. Prediction programs and experimental databases are combined to locate the transcription start site (TSS) and the promoter region within a large genomic input sequence. Transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) can be predicted using several public databases and user-defined motifs. Also, a phylogenetic footprinting strategy, combining multiple alignment of large genomic sequences and assignment of various scores reflecting the evolutionary selection pressure, allows for evaluation and ranking of TFBS predictions. PromAn results can be displayed in an interactive graphical user interface, PromAnGUI. It integrates all of this information to highlight active promoter regions, to identify among the huge number of TFBS predictions those which are the most likely to be potentially functional and to facilitate user refined analysis. Such an integrative approach is essential in the face of a growing number of tools dedicated to promoter analysis in order to propose hypotheses to direct further experimental validations. PromAn is publicly available at

A review of in vivo animal studies in retinal prosthesis research

Background: The development of a functional retinal prosthesis for acquired blindness is a great challenge. Rapid progress in the field over the last 15years would not have been possible without extensive animal experimentation pertaining to device design and fabrication, biocompatibility, stimulation parameters and functional responses. This paper presents an overview of in vivo animal research related to retinal prosthetics, and aims to summarize the relevant studies. Methods: A Pubmed search of the English language literature was performed. The key search terms were: retinal implant, retinal prosthesis, artificial vision, rat, rabbit, cat, dog, sheep, pig, minipig. In addition a manual search was performed based on references quoted in the articles retrieved through Pubmed. Results: We identified 50 articles relevant to in vivo animal experimentation directly related to the development of a retinal implant. The highest number of publications related to the cat (n = 18). Conclusion: The contribution of animal models to the development of retinal prosthetic devices has been enormous, and has led to human feasibility studies. Grey areas remain regarding long-term tissue-implant interactions, biomaterials, prosthesis design and neural adaptation. Animals will continue to play a key role in this rapidly evolving fiel