A resonance Raman microscope has been developed to study the structure of the retinal prosthetic group in the visual pigments of individual photoreceptor cells. Raman vibrational spectra are obtained by focusing the probe laser on intact photoreceptors frozen on a 77 K cold stage. To elucidate the mechanism of wavelength regulation in blue visual pigments, we have used this apparatus to study the structure of the chromophore in the 440-nm absorbing pigment found in "green rods" of the toad (Bufo marinus). The 9-cis isorhodopsin form of the green rod pigment exhibits a 1662-cm-1 C = NH+ Schiff base stretching mode that shifts to 1636 cm-1 in deuterium-substituted H2O. This demonstrates that the Schiff base linkage to the protein is protonated. Protonation of the Schiff base is sufficient to explain the 440-nm absorption maximum of this pigment without invoking any additional protein-chromophore interactions. The absence of additional perturbations is supported by the observation that the ethylenic band and the perturbation-sensitive C-10-C-11 and C-14-C-15 stretching modes have the same frequency as those of the 9-cis protonated retinal Schiff base in solution. Our demonstration that a blue visual pigment contains an unperturbed protonated Schiff base provides experimental evidence that the protein charge perturbation responsible for the opsin shift in the 500-nm absorbing pigments is removed in the opsins of blue pigments, as suggested by the sequence data.