Beautiful Eyes
If you look at a clear blue sky it’s possible to see the blood vessels in your own eyes. But researchers demanding a closer look have been working on ways to visualise the full complex network of vessels that permeate our eyeballs. Previous genetic and experimental attempts in mice have tended to look at one sub-section of vessels at a time. A new approach has represented the complete vasculature of the mouse eye at various stages of development (video, with different sections of vasculature digitally coloured). A process to make the eye material transparent is followed by high resolution microscopy and digital analysis. With this technique, the researchers observed how the iris vasculature (yellow) is remodelled during development just after disconnection from the early supply network. They also analysed the impact of injury on vascularisation, showing the platform’s potential for analysing eye disease impacts and treatments on a whole-eye scale.
Written by Anthony Lewis
Video by Luc Krimpenfort and colleagues
Div. of Vascular Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Stockholm, Sweden
Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Published in bioRxiv, December 2022 (not peer reviewed)
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