NEI Research News

Researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI) have determined how certain short protein fragments, called peptides, can protect neuronal cells found in the light-sensing retina layer at the back of the eye.

A team led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has identified, in mice, specific cells and proteins that control the sneeze reflex.

A new study by researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory substantially advances understanding of how a mammalian brain enables “visual recognition memory.”

A study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Stanford University School of Medicine shows that the normal day-to-day activity of neurons can drive the formation and growth of brain tumors.

Researchers at the Wayne State University School of Medicine have discovered that a metabolite called itaconate produced during cellular metabolism plays a role in protecting the eye from abnormal inflammation during infection.

A new combination of optical coherence tomography (OCT), adaptive optics and deep neural networks should enable better diagnosis and monitoring for neuron-damaging eye and brain diseases like glaucoma.

University of Pennsylvania researchers propose a new theory for how the brain understands the level of activation expected from a sensory input and corrects for it, leaving behind the signal for familiarity.

Researchers at UCSD have developed a neural implant that monitors the activity of different parts of the brain at the same time, from the surface to deep structures.

As regenerative therapies for blinding diseases move closer to clinical trials, the NEI's functional imaging consortium is pioneering noninvasive technologies to monitor the function of the retina’s neurons and their connections to the brain.

A new study showed that ingesting the compound citicoline restored optic nerve (neural) signals between the brain and eye to near-normal levels in the study rats.