Scholars@Duke
Greg D. Field

Greg D. Field

Adjunct Associate Professor of Neurobiology
Neurobiology
Box 3209, Durham, NC 27710
Bryan Research Building, 311 Research Drive Room 427D, Durham, NC 27710

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

Projection targeting with phototagging to study the structure and function of retinal ganglion cells.

Journal article Cell Rep Methods · March 23, 2026 Understanding the structure-function relationships across neurons is challenging, particularly when circuits are composed of dozens of distinct cell types. We refined an approach, called "projection targeting with phototagging", that allows simultaneous el ... Full text Link to item Cite

Retinal ganglion cell function: ON and OFF pathways.

Journal article Handb Clin Neurol · 2026 The segregation of visual signals into ON and OFF pathways represents a fundamental organizing principle of retinal processing that has been conserved across vertebrates for approximately 500 million years. This division begins at the photoreceptor-bipolar ... Full text Link to item Cite

Decomposition of retinal ganglion cell electrical images for cell type and functional inference.

Journal article J Neural Eng · July 9, 2025 Objective.Identifying neuronal cell types and their biophysical properties based on their extracellular electrical features is a major challenge for experimental neuroscience and for the development of high-resolution brain-machine interfaces. One example ... Full text Link to item Cite

Projection Targeting with Phototagging to Study the Structure and Function of Retinal Ganglion Cells.

Journal article bioRxiv · June 28, 2025 UNLABELLED: Visual information from the retina is sent to diverse targets throughout the brain by different retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Much of our knowledge about the different RGC types and how they are routed to these brain targets is based on mice, ... Full text Link to item Cite

Decomposition of retinal ganglion cell electrical images for cell type and functional inference.

Journal article bioRxiv · May 23, 2025 OBJECTIVE: Identifying neuronal cell types and their biophysical properties based on their extracellular electrical features is a major challenge for experimental neuroscience and for the development of high-resolution brain-machine interfaces. One example ... Full text Link to item Cite

Biophysical neural adaptation mechanisms enable artificial neural networks to capture dynamic retinal computation.

Journal article Nat Commun · July 16, 2024 Adaptation is a universal aspect of neural systems that changes circuit computations to match prevailing inputs. These changes facilitate efficient encoding of sensory inputs while avoiding saturation. Conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs) have li ... Full text Link to item Cite

DART.2: bidirectional synaptic pharmacology with thousandfold cellular specificity.

Journal article Nat Methods · July 2024 Precision pharmacology aims to manipulate specific cellular interactions within complex tissues. In this pursuit, we introduce DART.2 (drug acutely restricted by tethering), a second-generation cell-specific pharmacology technology. The core advance is opt ... Full text Link to item Cite

Local synaptic inhibition mediates cerebellar granule cell pattern separation and enables learned sensorimotor associations.

Journal article Nat Neurosci · April 2024 The cerebellar cortex has a key role in generating predictive sensorimotor associations. To do so, the granule cell layer is thought to establish unique sensorimotor representations for learning. However, how this is achieved and how granule cell populatio ... Full text Link to item Cite

GABAergic Inhibition Controls Receptive Field Size, Sensitivity, and Contrast Preference of Direction Selective Retinal Ganglion Cells Near the Threshold of Vision.

Journal article J Neurosci · March 13, 2024 Information about motion is encoded by direction-selective retinal ganglion cells (DSGCs). These cells reliably transmit this information across a broad range of light levels, spanning moonlight to sunlight. Previous work indicates that adaptation to low l ... Full text Link to item Cite

Population encoding of stimulus features along the visual hierarchy.

Journal article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · January 23, 2024 The retina and primary visual cortex (V1) both exhibit diverse neural populations sensitive to diverse visual features. Yet it remains unclear how neural populations in each area partition stimulus space to span these features. One possibility is that neur ... Full text Link to item Cite

Late gene therapy limits the restoration of retinal function in a mouse model of retinitis pigmentosa.

Journal article Nat Commun · December 12, 2023 Retinitis pigmentosa is an inherited photoreceptor degeneration that begins with rod loss followed by cone loss. This cell loss greatly diminishes vision, with most patients becoming legally blind. Gene therapies are being developed, but it is unknown how ... Full text Link to item Cite

Scalable Variational Inference for Low-Rank Spatiotemporal Receptive Fields.

Journal article Neural Comput · May 12, 2023 An important problem in systems neuroscience is to characterize how a neuron integrates sensory inputs across space and time. The linear receptive field provides a mathematical characterization of this weighting function and is commonly used to quantify ne ... Full text Link to item Cite

Cones and cone pathways remain functional in advanced retinal degeneration.

Journal article Curr Biol · April 24, 2023 Most defects causing retinal degeneration in retinitis pigmentosa (RP) are rod-specific mutations, but the subsequent degeneration of cones, which produces loss of daylight vision and high-acuity perception, is the most debilitating feature of the disease. ... Full text Link to item Cite

Large-scale interrogation of retinal cell functions by 1-photon light-sheet microscopy.

Journal article Cell Rep Methods · April 24, 2023 Visual processing in the retina depends on the collective activity of large ensembles of neurons organized in different layers. Current techniques for measuring activity of layer-specific neural ensembles rely on expensive pulsed infrared lasers to drive 2 ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neuroscience: Visual restoration with optogenetics.

Journal article Curr Biol · February 6, 2023 Treating photoreceptor degenerative diseases is an exciting application of optogenetic technologies. However, there are significant challenges, such as producing normal visual signaling as the retina rewires in response to photoreceptor death. However, a n ... Full text Link to item Cite

Efficient coding, channel capacity, and the emergence of retinal mosaics.

Journal article Adv Neural Inf Process Syst · December 2022 Among the most striking features of retinal organization is the grouping of its output neurons, the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), into a diversity of functional types. Each of these types exhibits a mosaic-like organization of receptive fields (RFs) that ... Link to item Cite

Robust cone-mediated signaling persists late into rod photoreceptor degeneration.

Journal article Elife · August 30, 2022 Rod photoreceptor degeneration causes deterioration in the morphology and physiology of cone photoreceptors along with changes in retinal circuits. These changes could diminish visual signaling at cone-mediated light levels, thereby limiting the efficacy o ... Full text Link to item Cite

An optical approach for mapping functional connectivity at single-cell resolution in brain circuits.

Journal article Cell Rep Methods · August 22, 2022 In the current issue of Cell Reports Methods, Spampinato et al. demonstrate a multiplexed system combining holographic photo-stimulation and functional imaging that may offer a generalizable approach for revealing how signals interact in complex neural cir ... Full text Link to item Cite

Scene statistics and noise determine the relative arrangement of receptive field mosaics.

Journal article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · September 28, 2021 Many sensory systems utilize parallel ON and OFF pathways that signal stimulus increments and decrements, respectively. These pathways consist of ensembles or grids of ON and OFF detectors spanning sensory space. Yet, encoding by opponent pathways raises a ... Full text Link to item Cite

High-resolution light-field microscopy with patterned illumination.

Journal article Biomed Opt Express · July 1, 2021 Light-field fluorescence microscopy can record large-scale population activity of neurons expressing genetically-encoded fluorescent indicators within volumes of tissue. Conventional light-field microscopy (LFM) suffers from poor lateral resolution when us ... Full text Link to item Cite

Inter-mosaic coordination of retinal receptive fields.

Journal article Nature · April 2021 The output of the retina is organized into many detector grids, called 'mosaics', that signal different features of visual scenes to the brain1-4. Each mosaic comprises a single type of retinal ganglion cell (RGC), whose receptive fields tile visual space. ... Full text Link to item Cite

Properties of multivesicular release from mouse rod photoreceptors support transmission of single-photon responses.

Journal article Elife · March 26, 2021 Vision under starlight requires rod photoreceptors to transduce and transmit single-photon responses to the visual system. Small single-photon voltage changes must therefore cause detectable reductions in glutamate release. We found that rods achieve this ... Full text Link to item Cite

The optimal spatial arrangement of ON and OFF receptive fields

Journal article · 2021 Many sensory systems utilize parallel ON and OFF pathways that signal stimulus increments and decrements, respectively. These pathways consist of ensembles or grids of ON and OFF detectors spanning sensory space. Yet encoding by opponent pathways raises a ... Full text Cite

Properties of multi-vesicular release from rod photoreceptors support transmission of single photon responses

Journal article · 2021 Vision under starlight requires rod photoreceptors to transduce and transmit single photon responses to the visual system. This remarkable sensitivity depends on a small voltage change reliably reducing glutamate release such that post-synaptic rod bipolar ... Full text Cite

Ignoring correlated activity causes a failure of retinal population codes.

Journal article Nat Commun · September 14, 2020 From starlight to sunlight, adaptation alters retinal output, changing both the signal and noise among populations of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Here we determine how these light level-dependent changes impact decoding of retinal output, testing the im ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Global Motion Processing by Populations of Direction-Selective Retinal Ganglion Cells.

Journal article J Neurosci · July 22, 2020 Simple stimuli have been critical to understanding neural population codes in sensory systems. Yet it remains necessary to determine the extent to which this understanding generalizes to more complex conditions. To examine this problem, we measured how pop ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Activation of Rod Input in a Model of Retinal Degeneration Reverses Retinal Remodeling and Induces Formation of Functional Synapses and Recovery of Visual Signaling in the Adult Retina.

Journal article J Neurosci · August 21, 2019 A major cause of human blindness is the death of rod photoreceptors. As rods degenerate, synaptic structures between rod and rod bipolar cells disappear and the rod bipolar cells extend their dendrites and occasionally make aberrant contacts. Such changes ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Probing Computation in the Primate Visual System at Single-Cone Resolution.

Journal article Annu Rev Neurosci · July 8, 2019 Daylight vision begins when light activates cone photoreceptors in the retina, creating spatial patterns of neural activity. These cone signals are then combined and processed in downstream neural circuits, ultimately producing visual perception. Recent te ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Dopaminergic modulation of retinal processing from starlight to sunlight.

Journal article J Pharmacol Sci · May 2019 Neuromodulators such as dopamine, enable context-dependent plasticity of neural circuit function throughout the central nervous system. For example, in the retina, dopamine tunes visual processing for daylight and nightlight conditions. Specifically, high ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Novel hybrid action of GABA mediates inhibitory feedback in the mammalian retina.

Journal article PLoS Biol · April 2019 The stream of visual information sent from photoreceptors to second-order bipolar cells is intercepted by laterally interacting horizontal cells that generate feedback to optimize and improve the efficiency of signal transmission. The mechanisms underlying ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Distribution and diversity of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in tree shrew.

Journal article J Comp Neurol · January 1, 2019 Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) mediate the pupillary light reflex, circadian entrainment, and may contribute to luminance and color perception. The diversity of ipRGCs varies from rodents to primates, suggesting differences in ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Temporal resolution of single-photon responses in primate rod photoreceptors and limits imposed by cellular noise.

Journal article J Neurophysiol · January 1, 2019 Sensory receptor noise corrupts sensory signals, contributing to imperfect perception and dictating central processing strategies. For example, noise in rod phototransduction limits our ability to detect light, and minimizing the impact of this noise requi ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Ignoring correlated activity causes a failure of retinal population codes under moonlight conditions

Journal article · 2019 The retina encodes visual stimuli across light intensities spanning 10-12 orders of magnitude from starlight to sunlight. To accommodate this enormous range, adaptation alters retinal output, changing both the signal and noise among populations of retinal ... Full text Cite

Pathway-Specific Asymmetries between ON and OFF Visual Signals.

Journal article J Neurosci · November 7, 2018 Visual processing is largely organized into ON and OFF pathways that signal stimulus increments and decrements, respectively. These pathways exhibit natural pairings based on morphological and physiological similarities, such as ON and OFF α-ganglion cells ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Gap Junctions Contribute to Differential Light Adaptation across Direction-Selective Retinal Ganglion Cells.

Journal article Neuron · October 10, 2018 Direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) deliver signals from the retina to multiple brain areas to indicate the presence and direction of motion. Delivering reliable signals in response to motion is critical across light levels. Here we determine how po ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Formation of retinal direction-selective circuitry initiated by starburst amacrine cell homotypic contact.

Journal article Elife · April 3, 2018 A common strategy by which developing neurons locate their synaptic partners is through projections to circuit-specific neuropil sublayers. Once established, sublayers serve as a substrate for selective synapse formation, but how sublayers arise during neu ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Nogo receptor 1 is expressed by nearly all retinal ganglion cells.

Journal article PLoS One · 2018 A variety of conditions ranging from glaucoma to blunt force trauma lead to optic nerve atrophy. Identifying signaling pathways for stimulating axon growth in the optic nerve may lead to treatments for these pathologies. Inhibiting signaling by the nogo-66 ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Pathway-specific asymmetries between ON and OFF visual signals

Journal article · 2018 Visual processing is largely organized into ON and OFF pathways that signal stimulus increments and decrements, respectively. These pathways exhibit natural pairings based on morphological and physiological similarities, such as ON and OFF alpha ganglion c ... Full text Open Access Cite

Temporal resolution of single photon responses in primate rod photoreceptors and limits imposed by cellular noise

Journal article · 2018 Summary Sensory receptor noise corrupts sensory signals, contributing to imperfect perception and dictating central processing strategies. For example, noise in rod phototransduction limits our ability to detect light and minimizing the impact of ... Full text Cite

"Silent" NMDA Synapses Enhance Motion Sensitivity in a Mature Retinal Circuit.

Journal article Neuron · December 6, 2017 Retinal direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) have the remarkable ability to encode motion over a wide range of contrasts, relying on well-coordinated excitation and inhibition (E/I). E/I is orchestrated by a diverse set of glutamatergic bipolar cells ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Cell type-specific changes in retinal ganglion cell function induced by rod death and cone reorganization in rats.

Journal article J Neurophysiol · July 1, 2017 We have determined the impact of rod death and cone reorganization on the spatiotemporal receptive fields (RFs) and spontaneous activity of distinct retinal ganglion cell (RGC) types. We compared RGC function between healthy and retinitis pigmentosa (RP) m ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Behavioural and physiological limits to vision in mammals.

Journal article Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci · April 5, 2017 Human vision is exquisitely sensitive-a dark-adapted observer is capable of reliably detecting the absorption of a few quanta of light. Such sensitivity requires that the sensory receptors of the retina, rod photoreceptors, generate a reliable signal when ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Identification of a Retinal Circuit for Recurrent Suppression Using Indirect Electrical Imaging.

Journal article Curr Biol · August 8, 2016 Understanding the function of modulatory interneuron networks is a major challenge, because such networks typically operate over long spatial scales and involve many neurons of different types. Here, we use an indirect electrical imaging method to reveal t ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Mapping nonlinear receptive field structure in primate retina at single cone resolution.

Journal article Elife · October 30, 2015 The function of a neural circuit is shaped by the computations performed by its interneurons, which in many cases are not easily accessible to experimental investigation. Here, we elucidate the transformation of visual signals flowing from the input to the ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Anatomical identification of extracellularly recorded cells in large-scale multielectrode recordings.

Journal article J Neurosci · March 18, 2015 This study combines for the first time two major approaches to understanding the function and structure of neural circuits: large-scale multielectrode recordings, and confocal imaging of labeled neurons. To achieve this end, we develop a novel approach to ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

A polyaxonal amacrine cell population in the primate retina.

Journal article J Neurosci · March 5, 2014 Amacrine cells are the most diverse and least understood cell class in the retina. Polyaxonal amacrine cells (PACs) are a unique subset identified by multiple long axonal processes. To explore their functional properties, populations of PACs were identifie ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Retinal representation of the elementary visual signal.

Journal article Neuron · January 8, 2014 The propagation of visual signals from individual cone photoreceptors through parallel neural circuits was examined in the primate retina. Targeted stimulation of individual cones was combined with simultaneous recording from multiple retinal ganglion cell ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Monte Carlo methods for localization of cones given multielectrode retinal ganglion cell recordings.

Journal article Network · 2013 It has recently become possible to identify cone photoreceptors in primate retina from multi-electrode recordings of ganglion cell spiking driven by visual stimuli of sufficiently high spatial resolution. In this paper we present a statistical approach to ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Efficient coding of spatial information in the primate retina.

Journal article J Neurosci · November 14, 2012 Sensory neurons have been hypothesized to efficiently encode signals from the natural environment subject to resource constraints. The predictions of this efficient coding hypothesis regarding the spatial filtering properties of the visual system have been ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Correlated firing among major ganglion cell types in primate retina.

Journal article J Physiol · January 1, 2011 Retinal ganglion cells exhibit substantial correlated firing: a tendency to fire nearly synchronously at rates different from those expected by chance. These correlations suggest that network interactions significantly shape the visual signal transmitted f ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Advances in color science: from retina to behavior.

Journal article J Neurosci · November 10, 2010 Color has become a premier model system for understanding how information is processed by neural circuits, and for investigating the relationships among genes, neural circuits, and perception. Both the physical stimulus for color and the perceptual output ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Functional connectivity in the retina at the resolution of photoreceptors.

Journal article Nature · October 7, 2010 To understand a neural circuit requires knowledge of its connectivity. Here we report measurements of functional connectivity between the input and ouput layers of the macaque retina at single-cell resolution and the implications of these for colour vision ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Optimal processing of photoreceptor signals is required to maximize behavioural sensitivity.

Journal article J Physiol · June 1, 2010 The sensitivity of receptor cells places a fundamental limit upon the sensitivity of sensory systems. For example, the signal-to-noise ratio of sensory receptors has been suggested to limit absolute thresholds in the visual and auditory systems. However, t ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

High-sensitivity rod photoreceptor input to the blue-yellow color opponent pathway in macaque retina.

Journal article Nat Neurosci · September 2009 Small bistratified cells (SBCs) in the primate retina carry a major blue-yellow opponent signal to the brain. We found that SBCs also carry signals from rod photoreceptors, with the same sign as S cone input. SBCs exhibited robust responses under low scoto ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

The structure of large-scale synchronized firing in primate retina.

Journal article J Neurosci · April 15, 2009 Synchronized firing among neurons has been proposed to constitute an elementary aspect of the neural code in sensory and motor systems. However, it remains unclear how synchronized firing affects the large-scale patterns of activity and redundancy of visua ... Full text Link to item Cite

Uniform signal redundancy of parasol and midget ganglion cells in primate retina.

Journal article J Neurosci · April 8, 2009 The collective representation of visual space in high resolution visual pathways was explored by simultaneously measuring the receptive fields of hundreds of ON and OFF midget and parasol ganglion cells in isolated primate retina. As expected, the receptiv ... Full text Link to item Cite

Receptive fields in primate retina are coordinated to sample visual space more uniformly.

Journal article PLoS Biol · April 7, 2009 In the visual system, large ensembles of neurons collectively sample visual space with receptive fields (RFs). A puzzling problem is how neural ensembles provide a uniform, high-resolution visual representation in spite of irregularities in the RFs of indi ... Full text Link to item Cite

Spatial properties and functional organization of small bistratified ganglion cells in primate retina.

Journal article J Neurosci · November 28, 2007 The primate visual system consists of parallel pathways initiated by distinct cell types in the retina that encode different features of the visual scene. Small bistratified cells (SBCs), which form a major projection to the thalamus, exhibit blue-ON/yello ... Full text Link to item Cite

Identification and characterization of a Y-like primate retinal ganglion cell type.

Journal article J Neurosci · October 10, 2007 The primate retina communicates visual information to the brain via a set of parallel pathways that originate from at least 22 anatomically distinct types of retinal ganglion cells. Knowledge of the physiological properties of these ganglion cell types is ... Full text Link to item Cite

Information processing in the primate retina: circuitry and coding.

Journal article Annu Rev Neurosci · 2007 The function of any neural circuit is governed by connectivity of neurons in the circuit and the computations performed by the neurons. Recent research on retinal function has substantially advanced understanding in both areas. First, visual information is ... Full text Link to item Cite

The structure of multi-neuron firing patterns in primate retina.

Journal article J Neurosci · August 9, 2006 Current understanding of many neural circuits is limited by our ability to explore the vast number of potential interactions between different cells. We present a new approach that dramatically reduces the complexity of this problem. Large-scale multi-elec ... Full text Link to item Cite

Retinal processing near absolute threshold: from behavior to mechanism.

Journal article Annu Rev Physiol · 2005 Vision at absolute threshold is based on signals produced in a tiny fraction of the rod photoreceptors. This requires that the rods signal the absorption of single photons, and that the resulting signals are transmitted across the retina and encoded in the ... Full text Link to item Cite

Mechanisms regulating variability of the single photon responses of mammalian rod photoreceptors.

Journal article Neuron · August 15, 2002 Variability in the single photon responses of rod photoreceptors limits the accuracy with which the number and timing of photon absorptions are encoded. We investigated how much single photon responses of mammalian rods fluctuate and what mechanisms contro ... Full text Link to item Cite

Nonlinear signal transfer from mouse rods to bipolar cells and implications for visual sensitivity.

Journal article Neuron · May 30, 2002 We investigated the impact of rod-bipolar signal transfer on visual sensitivity. Two observations indicate that rod-rod bipolar signal transfer is nonlinear. First, responses of rods increased linearly with flash strength, while those of rod bipolars incre ... Full text Link to item Cite