Month: November 2011

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Bärbel Rohrer, Ph.D. Stanley H. and Theodora L. Feldberg Chair in Ophthalmology

I am deliriously happy to report that our good friend and colleague, Bärbel Rohrer was just appointed the Stanley H. and Theodora L. Feldberg Chair in Ophthalmology at Medical University of South Carolina.  Many congratulations to her and we’ll look forward to congratulating her in person when she comes to visit us to deliver a …

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Keratoprosthesis

This image is from a patient has a keratoprosthesis or artificial cornea.  Photograph was made by James Gilman of the Moran Eye Center using a sclerotic scatter illumination with a Zeiss photo slitlamp and a Nikon D-1X camera.

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Notable Paper: Acute destruction of the synaptic ribbon reveals a role for the ribbon in vesicle priming

This article by Josefin Snellman, Bhupesh Mehta, Norbert Babai, Theodore M Bartoletti, Wendy Akmentin, Adam Francis, Gary Matthews, Wallace Thoreson and David Zenisek examines the vesicular priming process at synaptic ribbons. Synaptic ribbons are specialized presynaptic structures at specialized neurons that encode graded information in an analog sense, rather than all or nothing conductions of information that …

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Notable Paper: Long-term RNA interference gene therapy in a dominant retinitis pigmentosa mouse model

Hereditary retinal dystrophies (retinitis pigmentosa, Leber congenital amaurosis, cone-rod dystrophies, macular degeneration) are characterized by loss of visual function, sometimes starting during early childhood, other times in late adulthood.  About 30% of these dystrophies are inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion (RetNet), caused by gain-of-function mutant alleles which encode a malignant form of a normal …

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