Juan Pérez Fernández, a member of CINBIO, leads a research project published in Nature Communications

Juan Pérez Fernández, a member of the Neurocircuits research group at CINBIO, part of the CIGUS Network, is the lead author of a scientific article published in Nature Communications that demonstrates that lampreys and humans share the same basic eye movements.

The results are part of a study conducted by an international team led by Juan Pérez, a Ramón y Cajal researcher at CINBIO, in collaboration with Tobias Wibble, Tony Pansell and Sten Grillner from the Karolinska Institute.

In this sense, the study determines that the nervous systems of lampreys and humans share certain similarities; in fact, the lamprey is being used as the basis for a number of studies to understand the mechanisms that generate human eye movements.

The research shows that lampreys have the same basic eye movements as other vertebrates, including humans. The scientist from the University of Vigo explained that generating these basic movements “involves primordial neuronal circuits that do not actually require areas of the encephalon that were once considered essential for this task, such as the cerebellum or the visual cortex”. According to Pérez Fernández, this discovery proves that “basic eye movements appeared very early on in the evolution of vertebrates and the circuits that control them have a high degree of conservation”.

Juan Pérez-Fernández therefore considers that the study not only contributes to the evolutionary perspective, but also that the results “show that in order to understand the mechanisms that generate human eye movements, as well as the associated pathologies, it is necessary to focus on the same cerebral areas that control these movements in lampreys”.