A Perfect Marriage: Molecular Genetics Ties the Knot with Electrophysiology in Studies of Visual Transduction

In recent years, the combination of classical electrophysiological techniques and targeted gene manipulations have provided for novel, powerful ways to address key questions in visual transduction. Electrophysiological techniques allow precise characterization of the electrical and chemical events that underlie phototransduction while gene manipulations allow specific modifications of the molecules of the transduction cascade. A particularly elegant example of how these techniques can complement one another is reported in the article by Sakurai et al. on p. 21 of this issue. To investigate the contribution of the different and unique properties of rod and cone visual pigments, Sakurai et al. generated mice in which the mouse green cone opsin gene was “knocked into” the rhodopsin gene locus, so that the mouse green cone pigment was expressed in rods, either alone (mG/mG) or coexpressed with rhodopsin (Rh/mG). These manipulations left the other participants in the rod transduction...