Remodeling of postsynaptic neurons in response to injury to their presynaptic partners occurs across neurodegenerative disorders. In the retina, limited understanding of the events following photoreceptor injury constitutes a major barrier in developing therapies to prevent or reverse vision loss. I will talk about the use a transgenic mouse that expresses diphtheria toxin receptor in a subset of cone photoreceptors, allowing for temporally controlled induction of cone ablation via diphtheria toxin injection. I will show results demonstrating that bipolar cell dendritic remodeling occurs within 7 days following loss of cones in the adult retina.

http://vision.ucsf.edu/dunnlab/research.html