The monocular deprivation model of amblyopia is characterized by a reduction in cortical responses to stimulation of the deprived eye. Although the effects of monocular deprivation on the primary visual cortex have been well characterized physiologically and anatomically, the molecular mechanisms underlying ocular dominance plasticity remain unknown. Previous studies have indicated that the tra...

A circadian clock modulates the functional organization of the Japanese quail retina. Under conditions of constant darkness, rods dominate electroretinogram (ERG) b-wave responses at night, and cones dominate them during the day, yielding a circadian rhythm in retinal sensitivity and rod-cone dominance. The activity of tyrosine hydroxylase, the rate-limiting enzyme in dopamine synthesis, also e...

A diallel cross experiment of 4 rice (Oryza sativa L.) female and 6 male varieties was conducted to study the genetic effects and their interaction with salt-stress condition of 7 agronomic traits in normal and salt-stressed planting conditions. The panicle length (PL), effective number of panicles per plant (ENP), plumped number of grains per panicles (PNG), total number of grains per panicles...

A new mixed-model method was developed for mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) by incorporating multiple polygenic covariance structures. First, we used genome-wide markers to calculate six different kinship matrices. We then partitioned the total genetic variance into six variance components, one corresponding to each kinship matrix, including the additive, dominance, additive × additive, do...

Heterosis is widely used in breeding, but the genetic basis of this biological phenomenon has not been elucidated. We postulate that additive and dominance genetic effects as well as two-locus interactions estimated in classical QTL analyses are not sufficient for quantifying the contributions of QTL to heterosis. A general theoretical framework for determining the contributions of different ty...

Visual experience is critical to the development of the structure of the primary visual cortex and, in turn, normal functional vision. The primary visual cortex contains maps of multiple features of the visual input, and these maps are characterised by specific types of geometric relationships. Manipulations of the visual environment during development in animals such as ferrets, cats and monke...

Effect of pressure application by a crutch to the axilla of the side of the dominant right nostril on the pattern of nostril dominance with emphasis on the time sequence of changes and recovery was studied in the young male Nigerians. The nostril dominance was assessed from the percentage of tidal volume flowing through the right and left nostril passages during expiratory phase (7). Applicatio...

Ground surfaces play an important role in terrestrial species' locomotion and ability to manipulate objects. In humans, ground surfaces have been found to offer significant advantages in distance perception and visual-search tasks ("ground dominance"). The present study used a comparative perspective to investigate the ground-dominance effect in chimpanzees, a species that spends time both on t...

Binocularity is a fundamental property of primate vision. Ocular dominance describes the perceptual weight given to the inputs from the two eyes in their binocular combination. There is a distribution of sensory dominance within the normal binocular population with most subjects having balanced inputs while some are dominated by the left eye and some by the right eye. Using short-term monocular...

PURPOSE To investigate the effect of ocular dominance on myopia development. METHODS One hundred seventy-eight myopic children (age range, 7-13 years) were recruited for a 2-year longitudinal study. The development of myopia was evaluated by the change of objective refractive error, determined with cycloplegic autorefraction, and axial length, determined with A-scan ultrasonography. Ocular do...