Reversible events in the transduction process of photoreceptors

In photoreceptors, a latency of many milliseconds elapses between the absorption of a light quantum and the occurrence of the late receptor potential, even for strong light stimuli. Surprisingly, this is much longer than the time necessary for conductance changes such as occur in membranes of neurones or muscles, mediated by chemical transmitters. There are several possible explanations for the long photoreceptor latency. (1) It may be due to properties of the visual pigment molecules. For instance, the temporal coincidence of the occurrence of metarhodospin II with the receptor signal indicates that the meta I-meta II transition might be the trigger for the electrical response in vertebrate photoreception. (2) It may be explained by properties of transport processes. Such a time consuming process could be the diffusion of an internal 'transmitter substance', which diffuses to a 'pore' in the receptor membrane. (3) A third possibility is the time needed to produce and accumulate chemical substances. The light-induced change of the visual pigment molecule might trigger a chemical reaction chain, in which the product of an earlier step triggers the next one. The experiments described here show that a considerable part of the long latency in photoreception is due to processes that are localised at the level of the visual pigment molecule.