Research Project
Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Visual input is received by retinal ganglion cells and their axons project mainly to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus. Then neurons in the LGN send their axons to the primary visual cortex (V1). Precise projections of the retinogeniculate and geniculocortical pathways render the topographic arrangement called retinotopy in the visual cortex. We used an optical imaging technique to investigate the change of the retinotopic map in the monocularly enucleated (ME) animals. We observed the duplication of the retinotopic map clearly across V1. The responding cortical area in the ME animals was larger compared with that of normal animals. To examine possible changes in the geniculocortical projections, we visualized the geniculocortical afferents in V1 and compared their location in V1 with the retinotopic map. The results suggest that the functional change of retinotopy is presumably accompanied with an anatomical alteration of the visual pathways.
All 2015 2014
All Presentation (2 results)
