A nonmammalian vertebrate model of blindness reveals functional photoreceptors in the inner retina
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In mammals, photoreceptors located in the inner retina convey photic information to the brain, regulating diverse non-image-forming tasks such as pupillary light reflexes and photic synchronization (entrainment) of daily activity rhythms. In nonmammalian vertebrates, the retina, deep brain photoreceptors, and pineal organ may be photoreceptive. Here we investigated light perception in the absence of functional cone and rod photoreceptors using GUCY1* chickens, birds carrying a null mutation that causes blindness at hatch. They showed light responses in both the pupillary light reflex and the entrainment of feeding rhythms to a 12:12 h light-dark cycle. Light responses persisted even when the extraretinal photoperception was abolished, but they were lost after enucleation; this strongly indicates the essential role played by the inner retina. A sensitivity spectrum study for the pupillary reflex that combined pupil responses to different monochromatic lights of various intensities demonstrated that a single opsin/vitamin A-based photopigment peaking at 484 nm drives photic responses; the best fit (lowest sum of squares, R(2)=0.9622) was attained with an opsin:vitamin A2 template. The results are the first characterization of functional inner retinal photoreceptors participating in the regulation of non-image-forming activities in nonmammalian vertebrates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".