Optic atrophy is not a disease in itself but a clinical sign. It refers to pallor of the optic disc which results from irreversible damage to the retinal ganglion cells and axons. The axons of the retinal ganglion cells make up the optic nerve and continue onto the optic chiasm, optic tract and up to the lateral geniculate body before they synapse. Injury to the retinal ganglion cells and axons...

In the human eye, all visual information must traverse the retinal ganglion cells. The most numerous subclass, the midget retinal ganglion cells, are believed to underlie spatial pattern vision. Thus the density of their receptive fields imposes a fundamental limit on the spatial resolution of human vision. This density varies across the retina, declining rapidly with distance from the fovea. M...

Retinal ganglion cell loss was investigated in the retinae of albino quails before and after the development of glaucoma. The isodensity maps of ganglion cells, the total number of ganglion cells, and the histograms of the cell size in the central region of the retina were similar between albino quails without glaucoma and pigmented quails. However, ganglion cells in the intermediate and periph...

PURPOSE Microglia normally exist in several layers across the retinal thickness. When retinal ganglion cells undergo apoptosis after lesion to their axons, microglial cells proliferate and promptly clear the debris. We have previously reported on the phagocytic response following optic nerve axotomy. Here, we present how microglial cells of deeper retinal layers are affected by transection of t...

Importance: Primary open angle glaucoma, an age-related, retinal neurodegenerative disease of unknown etiology, is treated by lowering intraocular pressure, even though elevated pressure present in only about 60% patients. Since we found that tolbutamide, which inhibits the opening ATP-sensitive potassium channels, modulates aqueous dynamics with a significant increase outflow, and since aquapo...

In this study, the metabolic activity of rat retinal ganglion cells during postnatal development has been examined in vivo using cytochrome oxidase histochemistry. The intensity of staining was measured by optical densitometry. The activity of cytochrome oxidase in retinal ganglion cells progressively increased from postnatal day 0 (P0) and reached a peak during the second week of postnatal dev...

PURPOSE Adenosine can protect retinal ganglion cells from the death that accompanies a general ischemic challenge as well as excitotoxic death. In other tissues, both A1 and A3 adenosine receptor subtypes can mediate protection. While a role for the A1 adenosine receptor in ganglion cell protection has been established, a potential for the A3 receptor has only recently been proposed. Although t...

To provide a quantitative description of postnatal retinal expansion in rabbits, a new procedure was developed to map the retinae, which cover the inner surface of hemispheres or parts of rotation ellipsoids, in situ, onto a single plane. This method, as well as the known distribution of Müller cells per unit retinal surface area, were used to estimate the redistribution of specific subpopulati...

Vision emerges from activation of chromatic and achromatic retinal channels whose interaction in visual cortex is still poorly understood. To investigate this interaction, we recorded neuronal activity from retinal ganglion cells and V1 cortical cells in macaques and measured their visual responses to grating stimuli that had either luminance contrast (luminance grating), chromatic contrast (ch...

Incubation of cat retinas with 3H-glycine in vitro, followed by horizontal sectioning and autoradiography, showed labeling of 10-12% of bipolar cells and 45% of amacrine cells. To ascertain the effects of glycine-accumulating bipolar and amacrine cells on the response properties of retinal ganglion cells, in vivo iontophoretic studies were performed in the cat eye. Glycine inhibited all ganglio...