We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
From water to land: Evolution of photoreceptor circuits for vision in air.
- Authors
Baden, Tom
- Abstract
When vertebrates first conquered the land, they encountered a visual world that was radically distinct from that of their aquatic ancestors. Fish exploit the strong wavelength-dependent interactions of light with water by differentially feeding the signals from up to 5 spectral photoreceptor types into distinct behavioural programmes. However, above the water the same spectral rules do not apply, and this called for an update to visual circuit strategies. Early tetrapods soon evolved the double cone, a still poorly understood pair of new photoreceptors that brought the "ancestral terrestrial" complement from 5 to 7. Subsequent nonmammalian lineages differentially adapted this highly parallelised retinal input strategy for their diverse visual ecologies. By contrast, mammals shed most ancestral photoreceptors and converged on an input strategy that is exceptionally general. In eutherian mammals including in humans, parallelisation emerges gradually as the visual signal traverses the layers of the retina and into the brain. When vertebrates first conquered the land, they encountered a visual world that was radically different from that of their aquatic ancestors. This Essay looks at how eyes evolved to cope with the move from seeing through water to seeing through air.
- Subjects
PHOTORECEPTORS; VISION; TETRAPODS; RETINA; MAMMALS; VERTEBRATES
- Publication
PLoS Biology, 2024, Vol 22, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
1544-9173
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1371/journal.pbio.3002422