{"doi":"10.1101/2024.07.03.601922","title":"Retinal bipolar cells borrow excitability from amacrine cells to amplify spatial features in dim light","abstract":"Abstract Bipolar cells (BCs) carry visual information from photoreceptors in the outer retina to retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the inner retina. Most BCs lack voltage-gated Na + (NaV) channels and action potentials. Instead, voltage signals spread passively from input to output synapses. Despite this, we find that blocking NaV channels reduces synaptic output of On-cone bipolar cells (On-CBCs). These cells borrow NaV channel-mediated excitability from electrically coupled A2 amacrine cells to amplify excitatory output, allowing voltage changes to be transmitted more effectively to downstream RGCs in dim light. Because neighboring On-CBCs form electrical synapses onto the same A2 cell, a spatially adjacent group of On-CBCs is more effective than a dispersed set for recruiting A2 cell electrical excitability and driving post-synaptic RGCs. This mechanism filters the neural representation of an image to highlight shapes over spatially uncorrelated stimuli, a sophisticated feature detection property that is well-suited for object recognition.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2024,"id":488691,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9501,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":571019,"name":"Logan Ganzen","orcid":"0000-0002-2790-8882","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1333650,"name":"Lawrence Man","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":53190,"name":"Hong Ma","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":455433,"name":"Scott Nawy","orcid":"0000-0003-4679-6756","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1333651,"name":"Richard H Kramer","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":690642,"name":"Shubhash Chandra Yadav","orcid":"0000-0002-2885-7183","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":42,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:08:19.655720Z","pmid":"39005421","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}