In their paper in Current Biology, MCB Professor Marla Feller and her collaborators show that visual experience is necessary for populations of Direction Selective Ganglion Cells (DSGCs) to become tuned to movement along the cardinal axes.
Image caption: Postnatal day 13 retina, where the cell bodies of hundreds of ganglion cells have been electroporated with the fluorescent calcium indicator OGB-1. Blue tracing shows the cell body and dendrites of a reconstructed DSGC. Courtesy of Rémi Bos.