New Eye Cell

The eye is a fascinating, thoroughly studied and, it was thought, well-understood organ. But now scientists have found an entirely new cell type (yellow) within the retina – the tissue that senses light hitting the back of the eye and transmits the information via the optic nerve to the brain. For the last century or so, two types of retinal neurons were known to exist: bipolar excitatory cells (red) – which connect with light-sensitive (photoreceptor) cells and transmit nerve impulses to the optic nerve – and monopolar amacrine cells – which don’t connect with photoreceptor cells and inhibit impulse transmission. The new cells, however, fall somewhere between: they don’t interact with photoreceptors, but mysteriously do transmit light impulses. How these cells function is unclear, but their discovery shows that even when researchers think they know an organ like the back of their hands (or in this case eyes), they can still be surprised.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image fromwork by Luca Della Santina, Sidney P. Kuo and Takeshi Yoshimatsu, and colleagues
• Department of Biological Structure, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
• Image copyright Elsevier 2016
• Published in Current Biology, August 2016