Barbara-Anne Battelle

Barbara-Anne Battelle

Professor of Neuroscience and Biology

Email:battelle@whitney.ufl.edu

Go to Battelle Lab home page
View video of research description

Biochemistry of Vision

It may be hard to believe, but on a dark moonless night, our eyes are actually up to 10,000 times more sensitive to light than they are during the day time. This change in sensitivity allows us to make the most of the limited light available at night without being blinded during the day. It is regulated in part by cyclical 24 hour "clocks" that are embedded in the light sensing tissue in our eyes, the retina. These clocks cause biochemical changes in the retina that increase light sensitivity when it is dark and decrease it when it is light. Most people notice as they age their vision changes, usually for the worse and especially at night.

What if . . . we could learn exactly how biochemical clocks change the sensitivity of the retina? Like a dimmer switch, we could then start to turn up the light sensitivity to allow anyone with weak vision to see up to 10,000 times better during the day time.

Trying to figure this out in a human or other mammal is very difficult because the "clock"; proteins and genes and the "light sensing"; proteins and genes are all combined in the same tissue in our eyes (very messy). However when we look to nature for a simpler model we find the horseshoe crab (scientific name: Limulus), an animal that is endowed with a total of nine "eyes". An incredible aspect of the horseshoe crab's vision is that its eyes become about one million times more sensitive to light at night than they are during the day. This animal is thought to use its increased visual sensitivity at night to find mates. Most important from the viewpoint of the experimental biologist is that much of this increase in sensitivity is controlled by only one clock, which lies in the animal's brain.

Here at Whitney we use the horseshoe crab's extraordinary, yet simple, visual system to better understand how the eye's sensitivity can be turned up at night and down during the day time. Imagine if we are ultimately able to figure how to do this in humans, and hence find a way to improve the sensitivity of our eyes as we age.

Barbara-Anne Battelle graduated with a B.A. in biology, chemistry and German from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She earned her Ph.D. in biology from Syracuse University. As a postdoctoral fellow, Battelle worked in the Department of Neuropathology and the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. She then became a Senior Staff Fellow at the National Eye Institute at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.

In 2007 she received the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Distinguished Mentor Award.