Seeing Unclearly

The light-sensitive tissue at the backs of your eyes, your retinas, allow you to see. But your macula is the real superstar of your vision. This tiny part of your retina is responsible for seeing fine detail. In the eye disease, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), it's the macula that deteriorates. Modelling AMD is tricky as mice don’t have maculas, so researchers created lab-grown retinal organoids made from human induced pluripotent stem cells. These organoids mimicked the makeup of the retina, including the macula. Fluorescence microscopy of slices through organoids (pictured) revealed adding chemicals associated with eye disease caused changes seen in AMD, namely, loss of photoreceptor cells (green) and more glial cells (red) in diseased organoids (right) versus healthy ones (left). Further experiments uncovered how photoreceptor cells are lost – through cell extrusion – and that the protein PIEZO1 is involved. This model can, therefore, help unpick what's happening in AMD.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image adapted from work by Manuela Völkner and colleagues
• Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD), Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, October 2022