NEI Research News

Researchers have made progress toward an approach that would use light-sensitive drugs to stimulate cells in the retina and restore vision to people who are blind or visually impaired.

Blood vessels that normally regress in mice before the eyelids open 10 days after birth persist if the mouse fetus receives insufficient light in the womb — showing that the eye needs light to develop during pregnancy.

Imagine you are building a house. You would need a team of specialists, including an architect, a general contractor, carpenters, an electrician, a plumber and many others.

If you’ve ever been sleep-deprived, you’ve probably had a firsthand glimpse of the blood vessels in your eyes.

By borrowing a tool from bacteria that infect plants, scientists have developed a new approach to eliminate mutated DNA inside mitochondria—the energy factories within cells.

Researchers recently demonstrated that human blood cells can be converted into a variety of eye cells important for vision.

Scientists have found that laser therapy is equivalent to two different dosages of corticosteroid medications for treating vision loss from the blockage of small veins in the back of the eye, a condition known as branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO).

Millions of light-sensitive cells called photoreceptors fill the delicate tissue in the eye known as the retina. These cells include rods that provide night vision and cones that detect color.

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids protect against the development and progression of retinopathy, a deterioration of the retina, in mice. This is the major finding of a study that appears in the July 2007 issue of the journal Nature Medicine.

Nerve cells that normally are not light sensitive in the retinas of blind mice can respond to light when a green algae protein called channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) is inserted into the cell membranes according to a National Institutes of Health...