September 28th, 2008 — In the September issue of PNAS, UC Davis vision researchers Dr. Leo Chalupa and colleagues report that mice lacking the beta2 subunit of the nACh receptor show robust waves of electrical activity in the developing retina. This result is surprising since cholinergic transmission in the retina has been thought to be important for eye-specific segregation in the thalamus and cortex, and these mice have been thought to lack both. This shows that there must be other factors that give rise to segregation deficits, rather than the simple lack of retinal waves.