We are excited that our BBSRC grant on the functional organisation of the avian retina has been funded! Watch this space!

Following the recent conclusion of the European Retina Conference 2023 in Tuebingen, Germany, we have uploaded all our posters to our online repository.

Check them out here!

Congratulations to George Kafetzis for winning this year’s best talk award at NeNa conference

The award recorgnises George’s ventures into trying to understand the retinal basis of vision in sharks!

For a little flavour, see a recent conference poster of his below

We are excited to see our new work on avian retina out in Nature Communications.

Seifert M^§, Roberts PA, Kafetzis G, Osorio D^§, Baden T^§. Birds multiplex spectral and temporal visual information via retinal On- and Off-channels. Nature Communications. 14, 5308 (2023). direct link. (bioRxiv version). pdf.

We find that birds use a fundamentally different strategy compared to mammals to communicate from the eye to the brain

Rather than neatly segregating information into neat and functionally opposite streams (On and Off, fast and sloww, greyscale and colour), most bird RGCs bunch the whole lot into single axons to “multiplex” the information.

This is energy expensive when considering spikes (mammals are great at saving energy here), but it is bandwidth efficient when considering limits on the optic nerve

We furhter posit that the bird strategy is the “original” one, shared with fish, reptiles and amphibians. The mammal strategy is probably derived, enabled by a radical simplification and reorganisation of circuits following the loss of 2 of the 4 original cones during the age of the dinosaurs

Delighted to have been elected to EMBO membership!

See the full press release here: https://www.embo.org/press-releases/embo-announces-election-of-new-members/