Our team follows an interdisciplinary approach, combining modeling and experiments, to tackle several issues.
How do ganglion cells process natural scenes ?
Decades of work on the retina have taught us a lot about how the retina processes visual stimuli. However, while we know a lot about it processes simple stimuli, there is still a lot we don’t know about how it processes natural stimuli.
How do ganglion cells code information together ?
Ulisse
What is the retina good for ?
Matthew
What are the circuits that implement ganglion cell computations ?
The retina across evolution
Towards clinical applications
Vision restoration with optogenetics
Blindness affects 45 million people worldwide. In many cases of inherited retinal degeneration, photoreceptors are lost but retinal ganglion cells as well as many interneurons are spared. This opens the possibility to stimulate the remaining cells directly to restore visual function. Retinal prostheses are a promising solution and have been found to restore some useful perception in blind patients. However, the acuity of the existing devices remains very low, below the level of legal blindness, and therefore are often not sufficient to identify objects or to navigate in complex environments. Optogenetic therapies provide a possible alternative to restore vision with a higher resolution and specificity that can better mimic the natural output of the retina. In this strategy, a light sensitive protein is expressed in targeted neural populations of a blind retina. Expressing light sensitive proteins in ganglion cells can be a way to restore vision through the stimulation of these newly light-sensitive cells with patterned light to produce visual perception, although the first results show that the acuity is still low with this strategy. We are currently exploring an alternative strategy to restore richer functional selectivity, and possibly improve perceptual performance, by targeting cell types in the intermediate layers of the retina that are not affected by retinal degeneration.
Engineering of novel viral vectors for gene therapy with directed evolution
Fighting myopia
Methods
We develop novel techniques…
Large-scale recordings and spike sorting
Holographic stimulation
Generative models of retinal response to stimulus