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Summary: Visual cortical plasticity is high during early life, but gradually decreases with development. This is due to the Otx2-driven maturation of intracortical inhibition that parallels the condensation of extracellular matrix components into perineuronal nets mainly around parvalbumin-positive GABAergic neurons. Repressor Element 1 Silencing Transcription (REST) epigenetically controls the expression of a plethora of neuron-specific genes. We demonstrate that the conditional knockout of REST in the primary visual cortex of adult mice induces a shift of ocular dominance after short-term monocular deprivation and promotes the recovery of vision in long-term deprived animals after reverse suture. These phenomena paralleled a reduction of perineuronal net density and increased expression of REST target genes, but not of the homeoprotein Otx2 in the visual cortex contralateral to the deprived eye. This shows that REST regulates adult visual cortical plasticity and is a potential therapeutic target to restore vision in adult amblyopia by enhancing V1 plasticity.

Abstract As a counterpart to the four-fermion interaction, which describes massive vector exchange at low energies, we investigate the low energy effective action of photons under exchange of a massive graviton. We show how integrating out a massive graviton leads to the most general duality-invariant vector interactions in 4D or, vice versa, how any such interactions have a natural interpretation within massive gravity. Moreover, we demonstrate how the special case of Born-Infeld theory arises from arguably the simplest graviton potential within ghost-free dRGT massive gravity.