Sara Patterson

Box 314
601 Elmwood Ave.
Rochester, NY 14642
Office: Medical Center G-4111
Email:
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I am a neuroscientist interested in linking information processing in retinal circuits to downstream visual functions. My goal is to understand the many rarer, uncharacterized retinal neurons. That most of the ~20 ganglion cell types and >40 amacrine cell types have no known function indicates we may only understand a small fraction of the visual processing occurring in our retina, a thin sheet of neural tissue at the back of the eye that provides the sole source of visual information to the brain. Addressing this gap in knowledge is increasingly urgent. Our basic science understanding of what the retina tells the brain is a key limitation to further development of devices that aim to restore vision in the blind by replacing the retinal output, such as retinal prosthetics.

Open Source Software

• Adaptive Optics Object model and framework for organizing experimental data, metadata and code (AOData)
• Connectomics: 3D analysis and visualization toolbox for serial electron microscopy. (SBFSEM-tools)
• Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT): Semi-automated segmentation of retinal layers and choroid (OCT-tools)

Representative Publications

• Godat, T., Cottaris, N., Patterson, S.S., Kohout, K., Parkins, K., Yang, Q., Strazzeri, J.M., McGregor, J.E., Brainard, D.H., Merigan, W.H., Williams, D.R. (2022) In vivo chromatic and spatial tuning of foveolar retinal ganglion cells in Macaca fascicularis. PLoS ONE, 17(11): e0278261
• Patterson, S.S., Bembry, B.N., Mazzaferri, M.A., Neitz, M., Rieke, F., Soetejdo, R., Neitz, J. (2022) Conserved circuits for direction selectivity in the primate retina. Current Biology, 32(11), 2529-2538
• Patterson, S.S., Kuchenbecker, J.A., Anderson, J.R., Neitz, M., Neitz, J. (2020) A color vision circuit for non-image-forming vision in the primate retina. Current Biology, 30(7), 1269-1274
• Patterson, S.S., Kuchenbecker, J.A., Anderson, J.R., Bordt, A.S., Marshak, D.W., Neitz, M., Neitz, J. (2019) An S-cone circuit for edge detection in the primate retina. Scientific Reports, 9, 11913
• Patterson, S.S., Neitz, M., Neitz, J. (2019) Reconciling color vision models with midget ganglion cell receptive fields. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 13, 865

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