Cone count and morphological parameters measured from pde6c w59 retinas with and without SchB treatment.

Pde6cw59 retinas were microdissected from the 6-dpf larvae. These larvae were either exposed to DMSO carrier (pde6c DMSO) or SchB (pde6c SchB), under the same conditions that induced a positive effect of the Light-On VMR. All these retinas were subjected to immunostaining with a cone marker zpr1 [41] and imaged by confocal microscopy (Fig 4D and 4E). Then, cell count and morphological analyses of cones were conducted in a central-retinal region on the dorsal side of the optic nerve in the pde6c w59 retinas. WT cones were excluded from this statistical analysis because they were obviously different when compared with the pde6c w59 cones. For cell-count analysis, 7 and 4 retinas were used for pde6c DMSO and pde6c SchB respectively. From these retinas, cones were segmented from the 3D confocal z-stacks using parameters outlined in the methods. The subsequent morphological analyses only used those individual cones that could be successfully segmented from the images and were not distorted by their proximity to the optic nerve. The total cone numbers used in the analyses were 247 and 121 for pde6c DMSO and pde6c SchB respectively. The results show that SchB treatment did not significantly change the count or morphology of the zpr1-positive cones in the pde6c w59 mutants. The raw data for Table 3 are available in S4 File.