Saturday, April 18, 2009

CS: Compressive Sensing in the Dark ?

I was reading the following summary of the following paper: The Nucleus Inside Out - Through a Rod Darkly by Tobias Ragoczy and and Mark Groudine which abstract is:

In the nuclei of eukaryotic cells, euchromatin is located at the center, whereas heterochromatin is found at the periphery and is interspersed in the nucleoplasm. Solovei et al. (2009) now reveal that this normal pattern is reversed in the retinal rod cells of mice. This inversion might serve to maximize light transmission to photoreceptors in nocturnal mammals.



In the paper (see the summary), the researchers did a computation showing how the DNA location is acting as a focusing element as in a fiber optics (as shown in the figure above). What triggered my interest in this figure is the following: In the focusing case, a pencil of light coming in gets to be transferred as two peaks with the underlying assumption that two large peaks will trigger some type of clean response. In the case of mammals, the pencil of light coming in gets to be spread around with the underlying assumption that it will be drowned in noise and will not be detectable.

Here is my stupid question: You and I can see in the dark after some accommodation. Does this mean that our vision system switches to a compressive sensing system when in the dark ? It would give a new meaning to the name of this blog!

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