Continuing on the theme of disease in the retina, I’ve been looking at lots of early alterations in the structure and circuitry of diseased retina. Its both beautiful and horrifying. Beautiful in the sense that the biology in the normal retina is so precise and elegant. Horrifying in the sense that it is such a complex system that we are elucidating by connectomics approaches and there are so many opportunities for circuitry to become corrupted. Finding precise places and timing of alterations in the circuitry of retina is a huge challenge.
What you are seeing above is a view of the ultrastructure of the inner plexifom layer of the retina with connections between bipolar cells, amacrine cells, ganglion cells with Müller cells in-between them all.
A larger version of the above image can be seen here.