Melanopsin, they found, absorbs light and triggers a biochemical cascade that allows the cells to signal the brain about brightness. Through these signals, ipRGCs synchronize the body's daily rhythms to the rising and setting of the sun. This circadian rhythm controls alertness, sleep, hormone production, body temperature and organ function.
Brown researchers, led by neuroscientist David Berson, announced the discovery of ipRGCs in 2002. Their work was astonishing: Rods and cones aren't the only light-sensitive eye cells.
Like rods and cones, ipRGCs turn light energy into electrical signals. But while rods and cones aid sight by detecting objects, colors and movement, ipRGCs gauge overall light intensity. Numbering only about 1,000 to 2,000 out of millions of eyes cells, ipRGCs are different in another way: They have a direct link to brain, sending a message to the tiny region that controls the body clock about how light or dark the environment is. The cells are also responsible for narrowing the pupil of the eye.
"It's a general brightness detection system in the eye," said Berson, the Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences. "What we've done now is provide more details about how this system works."
The research, published in the current issue of Nature, provides the first evidence that melanopsin is a functional sensory photopigment. In other words, this protein absorbs light and sets off a chain of chemical reactions in a cell that triggers an electrical response. The study also showed that melanopsin plays this role in ganglion-cell photoreceptors, helping them send a powerful signal to the brain that it is day or night.
The team made
'"/>
Contact: Wendy Lawton
Wendy_Lawton@brown.edu
401-863-1862
Brown University
26-Jan-2005