Enhanced restoration of visual code after targeting on bipolar cells compared to retinal ganglion cells with optogenetic therapy

Optogenetic therapy is a promising vision restoration method where light sensitive opsins are introduced to the surviving inner retina following photoreceptor degeneration. The cell type targeted for opsin expression will likely influence the quality of restored vision. However, a like-for-like pre-clinical comparison of visual responses evoked following equivalent opsin expression in the two major targets, ON bipolar (ON BCs) or retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), is absent. We address this deficit by comparing stimulus-response characteristics at single unit resolution in retina and dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) of retinally degenerate mice genetically engineered to express the opsin ReaChR in Grm6- or Brn3c -expressing cells (ON BC vs RGCs respectively). For both targeting strategies, we find ReaChR-evoked responses have equivalent sensitivity and can encode contrast across different background irradiances. Compared to ON BCs, targeting RGCs decreased response reproducibility and resulted in more stereotyped responses with reduced diversity in response polarity, contrast sensitivity and temporal frequency tuning. Recording ReaChR-driven responses in visually intact retinas confirmed that RGC-targeted ReaChR expression disrupts visual feature selectivity of individual RGCs. Our data show that while both approaches restore visual responses with impressive fidelity, ON BC targeting produces a richer visual code better approaching that of wildtype mice.