Confirmation of Visual Responses in a Rescued Retinal Degeneration Line

Impaired spatial navigation is an early marker of neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s disease (AD). As part of a broader aim to examine a potential therapeutic to AD, we plan to use changes in spatially coded neuron responses as a proxy for neural function. As such, the animals we use as our model must also display unimpaired visual responses to complete spatial navigation tasks. Most current albino mouse model lines are blind or have other visual impairments, so we are testing visual discrimination abilities in our recently received FVB.129P2-Pde6b+ Tyrc-ch/Ant strain, which is negative for the retinal degeneration mutation rd1. We expect to see that these mice are able to discriminate against a visual cliff landscape.