Related Articles


Jacobs, G.H. (1998) Photopigments and seeing--lessons from natural experiments: the Proctor lecture. Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 39:2204-2216.

Rodieck, R.W. (1998) The First Steps of Seeing. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates. 562 pp.

Nathans, J. (1999) The evolution and physiology of human color vision: insights from molecular genetic studies of visual pigments. Neuron 24:299-312.

Deeb, S.S. (2005) The molecular basis of variation in human color vision. Clin. Genet. 67:369-377.

Luo, D.G, Xue, T., Yau, K.W. (2008) How vision begins: an odyssey. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105:9855-62.

Additional Reading


Hecht, S., Shlaer, S., Perinne, M.H. (1942) Energy, quanta, and vision. J. Gen. Physiol. 25:819-840.

Baylor, D.A., Lamb, T.D., Yau, K.W. (1979) Responses of retinal rods to single photons. J. Physiol. 288:613-634.

Baylor, D.A., Matthews, G., Yau, K.W. (1980) Two components of electrical dark noise in toad retinal rod outer segments. J. Physiol. 309:591-621.

Jacobs, G.H., Neitz, M., Deegan, J.F., Neitz, J. (1996) Trichromatic colour vision in New World monkeys. Nature 382:156-158.

Smallwood, P.M., Wang, Y., Nathans, J. (2002) Role of a locus control region in the mutually exclusive expression of human red and green cone pigment genes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99:1008-1011.

Smallwood, P.M., Olveczky, B.P., Williams, G.L., Jacobs, G.H., Reese, B.E., Meister, M., Nathans, J. (2003) Genetically engineered mice with an additional class of cone photoreceptors: implications for the evolution of color vision. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100:11706-11711.

Olveczky, B.P., Baccus, S.A., Meister, M. (2003) Segregation of object and background motion in the retina. Nature 423:401-408.

Hofer, H., Carroll, J., Neitz, J., Neitz, M., Williams, D.R. (2005) Organization of the human trichromatic cone mosaic. J. Neurosci. 25:9669-9679.

Jacobs, G.H., Williams, G.A., Cahill, H., Nathans, J. (2007) Emergence of novel color vision in mice engineered to express a human cone photopigment. Science 315:1723-1725.

Back to main Lecture page >>