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

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• 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• Published in bioRxiv, December 2022 (not peer reviewed)