Sensitivity to light—
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Rhodopsin transduces light energy into changes in membrane potential.
Vertebrate rods are sensitive to light with high sensitivity; cones are sensitive to color.
Receptive fields of photoreceptors send their output to ganglion cells along with lateral processing by horizontal and amacrine cells, enabling motion and contrast detection.
In this section you will learn about the structures of eyes, the organs that gather light energy and focus it onto photoreceptor cells. Then you will learn how visual pigment molecules of photoreceptors respond when stimulated by light energy and the molecular mechanism that transforms that light energy into action potentials. You will also learn about color vision and how photoreceptor information is processed in the neural layers of the vertebrate eye.
Animation 45.2 Photosensitivity
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