Mice have neurons that connect to both eyes but only propagate the signal from one or the other, simplifying the information sent to the cerebral cortex.
A new study suggests that DNA synthesized in the cell cytoplasm drives retinal cell death in an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness.
Imaged in real time in living people, immune cells at the surface of the retina could serve as biomarkers to detect retinal and possibly neurological diseases and track their progression.
It’s not clear why the patients with Leber hereditary optic neuropathy, a mitochondrial disorder that causes blindness, also experienced the modest benefits in their untreated eye.
Researchers repaired what is otherwise irreversible damage in the animals’ ocular neurons, by activating transcription factors ordinarily used to generate induced pluripotent stem cells.
A small study shows artificial intelligence can pick out individuals with coronavirus infections, but ophthalmologists and AI experts say the approach is far from proven to be capable of distinguishing infections with SARS-CoV-2 from other ills.