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Life imitates op art

Nature Neuroscience volume 14, pages 803–804 (2011)Cite this article

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The beautiful, undulating orientation maps in visual cortex have motivated many developmental models. A new study finds that this functional organization could be seeded in the retina by moiré interference between mosaics of ON-center and OFF-center retinal ganglion cells.

The visual cortex has maps for different features of visual stimuli, including ocular dominance, orientation and spatial frequency. The ocular dominance map was the first of these to be imaged. In 1974, Wiesel, Hubel and Lam injected radioactive tracers into one eye, which were transported trans-synaptically to the visual cortex. They then sectioned the radioactive cortex and used it to expose photographic film, revealing the characteristic stripes of ocular dominance2. This approach was possible because of the clear anatomical origin of the cells whose outputs segregate into ocular dominance columns: the left and right retinas. Imaging orientation maps, however, was a bit trickier. It took in vivo imaging to capture their structure. The orientation map was first imaged by Blasdel and Salama3 (Fig. 1c). These striking, multicolored images ignited the imaginations of neuroscientists everywhere. How can neural circuitry develop such a complex architecture for orientation maps? The answer may lie in pure geometry, and like the ocular dominance map, it too may emerge at the level of the retina. This provocative idea obviates the need for activity-dependent plasticity, a feature present in many models of the development of orientation maps.

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Figure 1: Moiré interference, retinal ganglion cell mosaics and orientation maps.

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  1. Spencer L. Smith and Ikuko T. Smith are at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, University College London, London, UK.,

    Spencer L Smith & Ikuko T Smith

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  1. Spencer L Smith
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Correspondence to Spencer L Smith.

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Smith, S., Smith, I. Life imitates op art. Nat Neurosci 14, 803–804 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2865

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