JAY NEITZ: Well, it all started because of our interest
in the health benefits of having natural light that
occurs at the right time of day that
helps regulate our circadian clock
and our mood and our alertness.
Well, in certain places, like where
it's gloomy outside a lot-- like in Seattle-- there's
lots of people that suffer from seasonal affective disorder.
And there's just all sorts of problems
of living under artificial lights
all the time where we're just not as happy and healthy as we
hope we would be.
It's known that there is a particular cell
inside of our eye that communicates
with the parts of our brain that are
responsible for these fantastic effects of light.
And so one effect is that it synchronizes
our internal biological clock.
So it's working properly with our activities.
The cones in our eye that are responsible for color vision
also send a color signal to the same cell that
goes to those same centers.
But it wasn't very well understood.
And so our idea was to try to understand this better.
And if we could understand how the cell works,
then we could use that in order to better figure out
different kinds of light solutions
that might solve some of our problems.
And ultimately, the original satellites
that have been proven to help people with depression
are super bright.
They're hundreds of times brighter than normal lights
that we use at our desk or something like that.
And they're very expensive, and they're heavy,
and then people were supposed to stare
at the super bright light.
And that works.
But we're thinking about the fact
that maybe just the regular lights
that people have in their office or their room
or get up in their bathroom in the morning
and get some good light that's going to be healthy for you.
In the real world, it's the light overhead
that we're using to see things that's also
driving all these other things.
And so if we put lighting that would be somewhat like sunshine
but indoors, but we could do our normal things,
that would be the great thing.
Ideally and what we've been working on
is a light that has both blue, very short
wavelength blue light, and longer wavelength
yellow, both inside of a white light,
and it switches between those.
But it switches between them in a way
that our cells that communicate with our mood and our circadian
rhythms, they can see these changes in the color.
But we don't.
But our conscious vision doesn't see them.
And so they look kind of like regular light bulbs.
But, inside, they're actually driving very robustly
the mechanisms in our visual system that
have all these great effects.
SARA PATTERSON: Well, I start by talking about circadian
photoentrainment, which is the process of how
we set our internal biological clock
to the external light-dark cycle and how,
as the sun rises and sets, the total amount of light changes.
And that's something that's been studied a lot.
But the color of the light actually changes as well.
And that's what this circuit that I'm studying
is involved in.
The idea is if you think of a picture of a sunset,
this is a color vision circuit.
It's not for seeing the colors of the sunset,
but for using the colors to tell the time of day.
I would definitely-- one thing I'd
work on is more studies about how the lights affect
our circadian rhythms, how we can slightly
alter the parameters to better entrain your circadian rhythms.
And then from just the anatomy and the retinal circuitry
side, the S-cone circuits, we know so little about them.
That's why it was so easy to find just one new S-cone cell.
And in the process, we found that there
is a few other cells that are also receiving the blue cone
input and potentially more uses for color vision,
not for color perception, but for other purposes.
These cells are projecting to other areas in the brain,
doing unknown functions, and we're
very excited to figure out what those cells are doing
and how it's relevant for our vision.