Frequency responses of rat retinal ganglion cells

<div>This repository contains the data associated with the manuscript, "Frequency responses of rat retinal ganglion cells", by Alex E. Hadjinicolaou et al., published in PLOS ONE. There are three components:</div><div><br></div><div>* recordings: whole-cell recordings from retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) [recordings.7z];</div><div>* reconstructions: morphological reconstructions from a subset of the recorded RGCs [ANU.7z | NVRI, part 1-3.7z]; and</div><div>* figures: MATLAB code used to generate the manuscript figures.</div><div><br></div><div>Note that there is not always a 1-1 relationship between the recording name (e.g. 050211r1c3) and the Cell ID associated with the reconstruction (in this case, 20110502_c2). The Excel sheet "recordings" within the file "data summary.xlsx" lists these associations. The "morphology" sheet within the same file contains the soma/dendritic field data obtained from measurements made using FIJI, an ImageJ-based analysis program. Morphological classification was guided by Sun W, Li N, He S. Large-scale morophological survey of rat retinal ganglion cells. Vis Neurosci. 2002;19: 483–493.</div

Activity of Retinal Neurons Can Be Modulated by Tunable Near-Infrared Nanoparticle Sensors

The vision of patients rendered blind by photoreceptor degeneration can be partially restored by exogenous stimulation of surviving retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Whereas conventional electrical stimulation techniques have failed to produce naturalistic visual percepts, nanoparticle-based optical sensors have recently received increasing attention as a means to artificially stimulate the RGCs. In particular, nanoparticle-enhanced infrared neural modulation (NINM) is a plasmonically mediated photothermal neuromodulation technique that has a demonstrated capacity for both stimulation and inhibition, which is essential for the differential modulation of ON-type and OFF-type RGCs. Gold nanorods provide tunable absorption through the near-infrared wavelength window, which reduces interference with any residual vision. Therefore, NINM may be uniquely well-suited to retinal prosthesis applications but, to our knowledge, has not previously been demonstrated in RGCs. In the present study, NINM laser pulses of 100 μs, 500 μs and 200 ms were applied to RGCs in explanted rat retinae, with single-cell responses recorded via patch-clamping. The shorter laser pulses evoked robust RGC stimulation by capacitive current generation, while the long laser pulses are capable of inhibiting spontaneous action potentials by thermal block. Importantly, an implicit bias toward OFF-type inhibition is observed, which may have important implications for the feasibility of future high-acuity retinal prosthesis design based on nanoparticle sensors