Study suggests high-frequency electrical ‘noise’ results in congenital night blindness

Credit: King-Wai Yau Laboratory In what they believe is a solution to a 30-year biological mystery, neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have used genetically engineered mice to address how one mutation in the gene for the light-sensing protein rhodopsin results in congenital stationary night blindness. The condition, present from birth, causes poor vision in low-light settings. The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrate that the rhodopsin gene mutation, called G90D, produces an unusual background electrical “noise” that desensitizes the eye’s rods, those cells Read More