Congratulations to Raunak Sinha, the McPherson ERI’s David and Nancy Walsh Family Professor, for his group’s latest publication in Nature Communications! In their article, Saha et al. show that light adaptation, our visual system’s ability to adjust its photoreceptors’ light sensitivity so that we can see over a range of light levels, varies across regions of the primate retina. More specifically, photoreceptors in the fovea, the center of the retina responsible for sharp eyesight in the center of our gaze, exhibit a weaker and slower adaptation than their counterparts in the peripheral retina, the area responsible for our blurry but fast peripheral vision. The authors found that a relative abundance of an ion channel gives rise to this regional difference in adaptation. These findings reveal unique functional specializations of the primate fovea, and advance our understanding of everyday vision and its susceptibility to damage in leading causes of blindness such as macular degeneration. You can read the full article here.