Jonesblog

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 …

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

The vasculature of the eye can provide amazing insight into systemic cardiovascular health.  For those studying the vasculature of the eye as an indicator of pathophysiological states, normative ground truth datasets become critically important.  Recently, George Azzopardi and Nicolai Petkov have made their annotated database of ground truth imagery of vascular bifurcations and crossovers in …

Continue reading “Retinal Fundus Images, Ground Truth of Vascular Bifurcations and Crossovers”

I’ve watched the development of the circadian rhythm research starting with Joe Takahashi‘s work discovering CLOCK in the mammalian SCN back in 1994.  Since then there has been an explosion of circadian rhythm biology work including an I suppose, unsurprising amount of research in the retina proper. This paper by Anamika Sengupta, Kenkichi Baba, Francesca Mazzoni, Nikita V. Pozdeyev, Enrica …

Continue reading “Notable Paper: Localization of Melatonin Receptor 1 in Mouse Retina and Its Role in the Circadian Regulation of the Electroretinogram and Dopamine Levels”