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Vision

Under the spotlight

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 7, page 332 (2006)Cite this article

The third, or parietal, eye of lizards and other lower vertebrates mediates the detection of dawn and dusk instead of conventional image-forming vision. The parietal eye photoreceptors resemble their lateral eye counterparts (rods and cones) in morphology, but could produce a hyperpolarizing light response most sensitive to blue light, as well as an unusual depolarizing light response most sensitive to green light — a curious phenomenon known as chromatic antagonism. Writing in Science, Chih-Ying Su and colleagues reveal the molecular machinery that underlies these pathways of light detection in the parietal eye.

By screening a parietal eye cDNA library from the side-blotched lizard, the researchers identified pinopsin, the blue-sensitive pigment in rods and cones that is known to drive the hyperpolarizing response, as well as a new pigment, which they named parietopsin. Double immunostaining showed that pinopsin and parietopsin co-localized in the same photoreceptor outer segment, where phototransduction takes place.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Su, C. -Y. et al. Parietal-eye phototransduction components and their potential evolutionary implications. Science 311, 1617–1621 (2006)

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  1. Jane Qiu
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Qiu, J. Under the spotlight. Nat Rev Neurosci 7, 332 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1915

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1915

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