RESEARCH ARTICLE The LIM protein complex establishes a retinal circuitry of visual adaptation by regulating Pax6 a-enhancer activity Yeha Kim1, Soyeon Lim1†, Taejeong Ha1†, You-Hyang Song1, Young-In Sohn1, Dae-Jin Park2, Sun-Sook Paik3, Joo-ri Kim-Kaneyama4, Mi-Ryoung Song5, Amanda Leung6, Edward M Levine6, In-Beom Kim3, Yong Sook Goo2, Seung-Hee Lee1, Kyung Hwa Kang7, Jin Woo Kim1* 1Department of Biological Sciences, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea; 2Department of Physiology, Chungbuk National University School of Medicine, Cheongju, South Korea; 3Department of Anatomy, College of Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea, Seoul, South Korea; 4Department of Biochemistry, Showa University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan; 5Department of Life Sciences, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju, South Korea; 6Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, United States; 7KAIST Institute of BioCentury, Daejeon, South Korea Abstract The visual responses of vertebrates are sensitive to the overall composition of retinal interneurons including amacrine cells, which tune the activity of the retinal circuitry. The expression of Paired-homeobox 6 (PAX6) is regulated by multiple cis-DNA elements including the intronic a- *For correspondence: enhancer, which is active in GABAergic amacrine cell subsets. Here, we report that the
[email protected] transforming growth factor ß1-induced transcript 1 protein (Tgfb1i1) interacts with the LIM domain transcription factors Lhx3 and Isl1 to inhibit the a-enhancer in the post-natal mouse retina. †These authors contributed Tgfb1i1-/- mice show elevated a-enhancer activity leading to overproduction of Pax6DPD isoform equally to this work that supports the GABAergic amacrine cell fate maintenance.