Clear Power

Healthy vision counts on a healthy blood supply. It’s why so many eye diseases that cause blindness involve disrupting the eye’s blood vessels. During development, your eyes create no less than three different blood vessel networks –  hyaloid, choroidal and retinal – with the hyaloid network disappearing as the retinal network appears. Investigating this process has proven difficult using traditional histology techniques as this destroys the structure of these networks. Researchers now present an approach to overcome this: light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LFSM) of isolated mouse eyes chemically treated to become transparent. Analysis of these microscopy images allowed researchers to measure and quantify the development of the hyaloid network over time and in 3D (pictured), as well as the distribution of various cell populations in different parts of the eye. This model, therefore, aids investigations into cell interactions across the whole eye so researchers can better probe eye health and disease.

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 Marie Darche and colleagues
• Clinical Investigation Center 1423, Quinze-Vingts hospital, INSERM-DHOS, Paris, France
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Communications Biology, October 2022