Bosch research team discovers binocular vision gene
Dr Catherine Leamey heads the Developmental Neurobiology Laboratory of the Bosch Institute. In collaboration with her colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Max-Planck institute for Biochemistry in Germany, Dr Leamey’s team have identified an important gene responsible for binocular vision. The researchers previously discovered Ten_m3 in a screen to identify genes that are important in establishing appropriate patterns of neural connectivity in the developing visual system. They have now shown that Ten_m3 is critical for the brain to meld images from the two eyes into one useful picture in the brain. This discovery may lead to new treatments for sensory disorders in which people experience the strange phenomena of seeing better with one eye covered. This is important for humans who normally see a single in depth view of visual space that integrates signals from both eyes; this process is disrupted in people with visual disorders such as strabismic amblyopia, for example.
The developing nervous system needs to overcome many problems to enable us to perceive the world appropriately. Understanding how projections from the two eyes are integrated in the brain has fascinated researchers for decades. “The work is exciting because it is the first discovery of a molecule which specifically regulates the alignment of the projections from the two eyes. The importance of this for visual function was elegantly demonstrated by the behavioural experiments performed by PhD student Sam Merlin. These showed that mice lacking Ten_m3 perform behavioural tasks that require patterned vision as if they were blind. If projections from one eye are blocked, however, the mice were able to perform the tasks normally. The rescue of visual function was astonishing and tells us immediately that it is the mismatch of projections from the eyes in the Ten_m3 mutants that underlies their visual deficits. The findings are also supported by our anatomical data”. The full report was published in the Sept. 4 issue of Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology.
Dr Leamey commenced this project while she was undertaking her Postdoctoral period at MIT in the laboratory Professor Mriganka Sur. The project continues to be an ongoing international collaboration, but much of the work is now undertaken in her laboratory within the Bosch Institute. Current PhD students Sam Merlin and Kelly Glendining as well as previous Honours students Paul Lattouf and Natasha Demel and collaborator Atomu Sawatari, also of the Bosch Institute, all contributed to the work.
This work was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, The National Institutes of Health and the Simons Foundation.
Pictured: Atomu Sawatari, Catherine Leamey and Sam Merlin (l to r).
