Dr. Keisuke Yonehara was awarded the 2013 VNS Young Investigator Award at the biennial European Retina Meeting (ERM) held in Alicante, Spain. Dr. Yonehara’s poster was selected from among 93 eligible poster presentations. The work presented by Dr. Yonehara was conducted in Dr. Botond Roska’s laboratory at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel. In this study, Yonehara and Roska and their colleagues addressed a longstanding issue concerning the emergence of direction selectivity in retinal ganglion cells. Using trans-synaptic viral tracing and optical imaging, they showed that bipolar cell axon terminals innervating the dendrites of directionally-selective retinal ganglion cells lacked direction selectivity, while the responses of those dendrites were themselves directionally selective. They also showed that the glutamate released by those bipolar cells lacked any direction selectivity. This technical tour-de-force provides a clear demonstration that the extraction of the direction of movement arises de novo at the dendrites of the direction-selective retinal ganglion cells.

The Editors would like to thank the members of the selection committee for serving in this capacity.

The recipient, Keisuke Yonehara, and his 2013 ERM poster.