the laboratory identified several proteins that help vision develop in very young animals. other scientists had discovered that the development of normal vision in cats is delayed when cats are raised in total darkness and that the development of vision can be triggered by brief exposure to light. villa-komaroff’s laboratory showed that exposing dark-reared cats to one hour of light caused a 2 to 3 fold transient induction of three specific proteins. this finding directly linked the expression of these genes with an environmental trigger (light) in the development of vision.