Biology, Chemistry and Modelling of Vision.

This years vision conference had 38 invited speakers. Sessions concentrated on 1 Retinal Cell Populations, 2 Mechanisms of Synaptic Communication, 3Mechanisms of Lateral Conduction, 4 Parallel Information Flows, 5 Primate Color vision, 6 Retina-based Hardware, 7 Bipolar Cell Axon Terminals, and 8 The Control of Ganglion Cell Excitation. The meeting was enlivened by several important break-throughs and interesting controversies. There was an excellent paper by Dr. Enrica Strettol on the organization of the inner retina. She has found a way to determine finally the densities of the different retinal cell sub-populations. Elio Raviola presented exciting new methods combining molecular biology and anatomy for the study of cell populations. An exciting session organized by Denis Baylor had three presentations on the use of multi-electrode arrays for analyzing the retinal output. The technical part using multi-electrode arrays is now solved. The excitement lies in trying to decode the message sent to the brain. Markus Meister gave a particularly stimulating talk, in which he proposed that the action of amacrine cells is indirectly communicated to the brain via the cross.correlation between neighboring retinal ganglion cells.