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NEI Research News

Thanks to the work of NEI scientists and grantees, we’re constantly learning new information about the causes and treatment of vision disorders. Get the latest updates about their work — along with other news about NEI.

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192 items
Axon terminals of color photoreceptors

Do people and monkeys see colors the same way?

April 28, 2023

Study from University of Washington shows some nerve cell circuits for color vision are uniquely human.
Views of a patio from a walking, crawling, or flying perspective, and a collection of scrambled views.

Visually navigating on foot uses unique brain region

March 15, 2023

Using vision to efficiently move through an area by foot uses a unique region of the brain’s cortex, according to a small study funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI).
Older woman's right eye

New insights: Eye damage in Alzheimer’s disease patients

March 3, 2023

Cedars-Sinai investigators map changes to the retina that correspond to brain changes in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease, opening a path to earlier diagnosis.
Synapses between neurons in thalamus and cortex.

Sparse, small, but diverse neural connections help make perception reliable, efficient

February 2, 2023

In a study from the Picower Institute at MIT, the first detailed mapping and modeling of thalamus inputs onto visual cortex neurons show brain leverages “wisdom of the crowd” to process sensory information.
Microscopy image of red fluorescent retinal neurons

Lab-grown retinal eye cells make successful connections, open door for clinical trials to treat blindness

January 4, 2023

Retinal cells grown from stem cells can reach out and connect with neighbors, according to a new study, completing a “handshake” that may show the cells are ready for trials in humans with degenerative eye disorders.
Microelectrode array and 2-photon microscope.

Human brain organoids implanted into mouse cortex respond to visual stimuli for first time

December 28, 2022

A team of engineers and neuroscientists has demonstrated for the first time that human brain organoids implanted in mice have established functional connectivity to the animals’ cortex and responded to external sensory stimuli.
Researchers examining brain

Brain cells use a telephone trick to report what they see

November 29, 2022

A new study from Duke University finds that single neurons conveying visual information about two separate objects in sight do so by alternating signals about one or the other.

Researchers investigate neuron differentiation in fruit fly brains

November 29, 2022

Researchers from the University of Illinois shed light on how neural stem cells called neuroblasts divide multiple times to sequentially produce neurons of specialized function.
Illuminated neuron projection from visual cortext

Neuroscience researchers awarded nearly $2 million by National Institutes of Health to study visual processing

November 28, 2022

Jordan Hamm, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Georgia State University, has received a five-year, $1.93 million award from the National Eye Institute.
Decorative

Seeing in 3D

November 9, 2022

Columbia University researchers examined what goes wrong in the eyes of mice with albinism.