This woman have an extra type cone cell.
AB Wire
Neuroscientists in the UK recently announced that they have discovered a woman who can see 99 million colors more than common people.
‘Tetrachromats’, as scientists calls people like her, have an extra type of cone cell- the receptor cells that detect color-in their eyes. Humans usually are trichromats with three types of cone cells in our eyes.
Identified as cDa29, this woman was a doctor in northern England has four cone cell types and can distinguish up to 100 million colors most of us have never even dreamed of, sciencealert.com reported.
The idea about tetrachromats was first suggested by Dutch scientist HL de Vries in 1948. He discovered that color blind men only possess two normal clone cells and one mutant cone that’s less sensitive to either green or red light. He showed that the mothers and daughters of color blind men had one mutant cone and three normal cones, that means they had four types of cone cells.
But this is the first time that scientists finding someone with an extra type of cone cell and it happened two years ago.
Gabriele Jordan from Newcastle University in the UK was the one who had formally worked alongside John Mollon of Cambridge University and tried a slightly different test to look for this super-vision.
From 25 women with a fourth type of cone cell Gabriele found cDa29 who differentiated the three different colored circles every time she sits in a dark room and looked into a light device as a test.
“I was jumping up and down,” Jordan told Veronique Greenwood from Discover magazine.
As per Mollon’s estimate that around 12 per cent of the female population should be tetrachromats because every color blind man pass his fourth clone cell onto their daughters. But most true tetrachromats would never need to use their fourth clone cell type, and would never realize they had special vision.
“We now know tetrachromacy exists, But we don’t know what allows someone to become functionally tetrachromatic, when most four-coned women aren’t,” Jordan told Discover magazine.
Jordan, who is continuing her research, is still working on it and her research about tetrachromats is not published or peer reviewed yet.
Jordan is trying answer the question about how cDa29 sees the world.
“This private perception is what everybody is curious about, I would love to see that,” Jordan said.