It's Okay To Be Smart

Into the Red

Can I recommend some tunes to listen to while reading this post? How about this? Or if you’re feeling reggae, then this.

A team of vision scientists has engineered a color vision receptor to be more sensitive and see farther into the red than any human!

The human eye contains two types of light receptors, rods and cones. The three types of cone cells are what gives us color vision. Each type of cone cell is sensitive to a different range of wavelengths, and added together, they cover our “visible spectrum” from violet to red (~390 nm to 750 nm). It’s like the RGB pixels in a screen, only in reverse.

The proteins inside those cones (called “opsins”) actually absorb light and turn it into a chemical signal. It’s one of evolution’s finest bits of magic. I mean, it’s a protein, that absorbs radiation of a very certain wavelength, transfers some charges and shapes, and makes a nerve fire. It’s mind-boggling, man! This new research took one of those opsins and tweaked it so that it can absorb the farthest red light wavelengths better than our own eyes can.

By tweaking the order and charge of the amino acids that make up the red opsin, they changed the wavelengths of light it responds most strongly to (from 587 nm to 644 nm). Since each cone sees a range of wavelengths instead of a narrow few, this means it can absorb a little bit of that far red light that our eyes can’t.

It hasn’t been put into any kind of living thing yet, only played with in a test tube, but it will help us understand how different opsins in different animals let them see different wavelengths of light (like how mantis shrimp can see ultraviolet light). Maybe one day we’ll create a super-sensory mouse or something, but for now we can be happy just to see how we see a little more clearly.

If you’ve got access to Science, you can read about it here.

Previously: Was Van Gogh colorblind? Could Monet see ultraviolet?