Juusola, M. and Song, Z. (2017) How a fly photoreceptor samples light information in time. Journal of Physiology, 595 (16). pp. 5427-5437. ISSN 0022-3751
Abstract
A photoreceptor's information capture is constrained by the structure and function of its light-sensitive parts. Specifically, in a fly photoreceptor, this limit is set by the number of its photon sampling units (microvilli), constituting its light sensor (the rhabdomere), and the speed and recoverability of their phototransduction reactions. In this review, using an insightful constructionist viewpoint of a fly photoreceptor being an ‘imperfect’ photon counting machine, we explain how these constraints give rise to adaptive quantal information sampling in time, which maximises information in responses to salient light changes while antialiasing visual signals. Interestingly, such sampling innately determines also why photoreceptors extract more information, and more economically, from naturalistic light contrast changes than Gaussian white-noise stimuli, and we explicate why this is so. Our main message is that stochasticity in quantal information sampling is less noise and more processing, representing an ‘evolutionary adaptation’ to generate a reliable neural estimate of the variable world.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 The Authors. Experimental Physiology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Physiological Society This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) > Department of Biomedical Science (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number BIOTECHNOLOGY AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES RESEARCH COUNCIL (BBSRC) BB/M009564/1 JANE & AATOS ERKKO FOUNDATION NONE LEVERHULME TRUST (THE) RPG-2012-567 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 22 Feb 2017 11:17 |
Last Modified: | 03 Aug 2023 12:14 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1113/JP273645 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:112574 |
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