Restoration of patterned vision with an engineered photoactivatable G protein-coupled receptor. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Retinitis pigmentosa results in blindness due to degeneration of photoreceptors, but spares other retinal cells, leading to the hope that expression of light-activated signaling proteins in the surviving cells could restore vision. We used a retinal G protein-coupled receptor, mGluR2, which we chemically engineered to respond to light. In retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) of blind rd1 mice, photoswitch-charged mGluR2 ("SNAG-mGluR2") evoked robust OFF responses to light, but not in wild-type retinas, revealing selectivity for RGCs that have lost photoreceptor input. SNAG-mGluR2 enabled animals to discriminate parallel from perpendicular lines and parallel lines at varying spacing. Simultaneous viral delivery of the inhibitory SNAG-mGluR2 and excitatory light-activated ionotropic glutamate receptor LiGluR yielded a distribution of expression ratios, restoration of ON, OFF and ON-OFF light responses and improved visual acuity. Thus, SNAG-mGluR2 restores patterned vision and combinatorial light response diversity provides a new logic for enhanced-acuity retinal prosthetics.

publication date

  • November 30, 2017

Research

keywords

  • Light
  • Photoreceptor Cells, Vertebrate
  • Protein Engineering
  • Receptors, Glutamate
  • Receptors, Metabotropic Glutamate
  • Retina
  • Retinal Ganglion Cells
  • Vision, Ocular
  • Visual Acuity

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC5709376

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 85037028168

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1021/ja408104w

PubMed ID

  • 29192252

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 8

issue

  • 1