It is known that nerve signals serving the sense of sight travel from the eye to the brain on the processes of retinal ganglion cells (retina output neurones).

These cells send specific information about colour, shape and movement of objects in our visual field. We study this process by analysing the fine pattern of nerve cell connections in the retina which generate these visual channels, and by identifying how the cells that contribute to each channel are distributed across the retina.

This project is an International collaboration with Prof. Dennis Dacey and Dr Yeon Jin Kim at the University of Seattle, USA. The aim of our project is to construct a “circuit diagram” of the fovea, which is the part of the retina that enables fine-grain vision for critical tasks such as reading.

This project is a collaboration with Prof Marcello Rosa and Dr Nafiseh Atapour at Monash University. It is known that the retina and optic nerve can degenerate following brain damage.

In this project we found that in marmoset this process, called transynaptic degeneration, is critically dependent on the age at time of lesion, with resilience to cortical lesions rising very rapidly in the first three postnatal weeks.