Neural Coding of Green Flash in Retinal Bipolar Pathways

What visual information do the graded potentials among retinal bipolar pathways actually transmit from photoreceptors to ganglion cells? The answer does not exist. Even the graded electric signals have not been understood completely. Here, this paper tries to analyze the encoding mechanisms of graded signals among the parallel bipolar pathways in response to brief green flash. The typical ON, OFF and ON-OFF bipolar cells simultaneously abstracted vectors from green flash stimulus with sine-like functions on their dendritic plane. Atypical bipolar cell had the synchronously monopolar response in contrast to the bipolar responses of typical bipolar cells, they also annotated green flash with facilitated stochastic (asynchronous and rate-coded) responses. Some complex ON-OFF bipolar cells with large voltage-gated Na current could generate high-frequent asynchronous responses, others had synchronous ONOFF responses to green flash. The green flash was synchronously and asynchronously represented by the multiple-dimension signaling space among the parallel bipolar pathways. These results unraveled the multiple-dimension neural codes for brief green flash, demonstrated N at ur e P re ce di ng s : h dl :1 01 01 /n pr e. 20 12 .6 78 6. 1 : P os te d 16 J an 2 01 2 the superior encoding capability of parallel bipolar pathways, and suggested the electrophysiological mechanisms of vision such as color space.