Cortical Functional Connectivity in Mouse Models of Early Blindness: Enucleation vs. Anophthalmia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early sensory deprivation drives large-scale reconfiguration of cortical networks, yet we still lack a clear understanding of the relative contributions of early visual experience and spontaneous prenatal retinal waves on the establishment of cortical networks. We compared two mouse models of early blindness, neonatal enucleation and congenital anophthalmia, across two genetic strains (C57Bl/6 J and ZRDBA) using mesoscopic calcium imaging of spontaneous activity and graph-theoretical analysis. Concomitantly, the functional network organization was redirected toward medial higher-order visual areas, the associative retrosplenial cortex, and somatosensory regions, while the primary and lateral visual cortices exhibited reduced influence and integration within the modular architecture. Notably, ZRDBA groups showed limited global changes to their cortical network. However, anophthalmic ZRDBA mice, lacking prenatal retinal waves, exhibited connectivity patterns more akin to enucleated C57Bl/6 J than to their enucleated littermates, suggesting a potential contribution of spontaneous prenatal retinal activity. These findings support a connectivity-constrained, experience-dependent model in which preexisting structural pathways guide diffuse, resilient reorganization following sensory loss.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".