Mouse Models of Alzheimer Disease in the MICRON Literature

About the MICRON Research Literature

These research pages organize published studies using MICRON imaging systems by animal species and the disease or condition investigated.

All publication counts and figures reflect the complete indexed research collection.

Explore related studies through the MICRON Research Hubs or search the complete publication collection in the reSEARCH portal.

Understanding Alzheimer Disease

Alzheimer disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease of the brain. It is characterized in people by:

• Extracellular amyloid beta plaques
• Intracellular neurofibrillary tangles of tau
• Synaptic and neuronal loss
• A clinical course of worsening memory and cognition

The retina is imaged in this work because it is central nervous system tissue that can be seen directly and repeatedly in a living animal without opening the skull, so structure, function and retinal blood flow can be followed in the same eye as the disease advances rather than sampled once at the end.

Alzheimer Disease in Experimental Research

What an animal model adds to that access is a defined cause and a known time course: the pathology is placed by genotype or by an administered agent, and the retina can be measured before, during and after it appears.

What such a model is less able to supply is the disease as patients have it. Many commonly used transgenic lines overexpress human APP and/or presenilin carrying familial Alzheimer-disease mutations and reproduce amyloid deposition and selected downstream consequences, but they generally do not reproduce the full human tau pathology. Models that add human tau can produce tau abnormalities or tangles, often using tau variants that are not Alzheimer-disease mutations, so each preparation reproduces a selected part of the human pathology rather than the complete sporadic disease. Risk-factor knock-in lines and chemically induced preparations answer that objection differently and carry limitations of their own.

Whether a retinal measurement indexes the state of the brain is contested rather than settled, both for retinal amyloid and for retinal thinning, and the two readings entail different things:

• If the retinal change does track cerebral pathology, the retina offers accessible evidence about a brain state otherwise reached by terminal histology
• If it does not, the same measurement still describes how the modeled process affects a second neural tissue, but cannot be read back as a statement about the brain

Deciding between those readings requires retinal and cerebral measurements made in the same animals and compared, which a retinal readout on its own cannot do. The human counterpart of that readout is partly macular, taken from the ganglion cell and inner plexiform layers of the macula as well as from the peripapillary nerve fiber layer, while a mouse retina has no macula.

Mouse Models of Alzheimer Disease

The mouse carries most of this work.

Transgenic and knockout lines allow a pathway to be removed or overexpressed, and cost, availability, short generation time and a large body of background data reinforce the choice.

A genetic manipulation constrains rather than isolates a mechanism: developmental compensation and pleiotropy remain possible.

Published MICRON Research: Alzheimer Disease in Mice

This page lists 26 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2011 to 2026, that study Alzheimer disease in mice.

Of these publications:

• 26 studies used mice as the primary Alzheimer disease disease model.

Scope of the literature collection: Publication counts reflect studies identified and indexed in the MICRON research corpus. This collection is not intended to represent an exhaustive review of all published Alzheimer disease research.

Which imaging and experimental techniques are used in these studies?

Technique counts are paper-level co-occurrences and do not necessarily indicate that a technique was applied to the focal species or focal disease model.

Capabilities and Limitations of Imaging Techniques

A summary of what each imaging technique listed above can measure, the information it provides, and its limitations in research applications.

Electroretinography

Records the retina's electrical response to light, giving component-sensitive information about outer- and inner-retinal function. It measures function directly, which no structural method does. Full-field ERG sums across the whole retina, so a small lesion can leave the trace unchanged; focal and multifocal variants trade signal amplitude for spatial resolution.

Optical Coherence Tomography

Optical coherence tomography provides high-resolution, cross-sectional images of ocular tissues in the living eye, allowing researchers to visualize structures at different depths. OCT is particularly useful for measuring tissue thickness, identifying structural abnormalities, and assessing the location and extent of tissue changes.

As a non-invasive imaging technique, OCT enables repeated measurements in the same eye over time, supporting longitudinal studies of disease progression and treatment response. Although OCT provides detailed structural information, it does not directly measure cellular activity or visual function. Tissue that appears structurally normal may still have functional abnormalities, making OCT a valuable companion to functional assessments such as electroretinography (ERG).

Topical Ophthalmic Drug Delivery

A compound applied as drops to the ocular surface. It is non-invasive and repeatable, so it supports frequent dosing without a procedure for each dose. What the route has to establish depends on the target: for an ocular-surface target, residence time and penetration into the surface tissue are the main barriers; for an intraocular anterior-segment target, the compound must cross ocular-surface and corneal or conjunctival barriers and reach an intraocular concentration sufficient for the experiment; for a posterior-segment target, additional ocular barriers separate the surface from the target and posterior-segment exposure is harder to establish.

Fundus Fluorescein Angiography

Fundus fluorescein angiography uses an injected fluorescent dye to visualize blood flow through the retinal and choroidal circulation. Sequential images show how vessels fill, identify areas of reduced or absent perfusion, and reveal dye leakage associated with vascular abnormalities.

This technique is particularly useful for evaluating vascular perfusion, blood-retinal barrier integrity, and abnormal vessel growth. Fluorescein angiography primarily shows dye distribution rather than the surrounding retinal tissue. It provides a two-dimensional (en face) view in which vessels at different depths may overlap. Cross-sectional and cellular structural details require other imaging methods, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) or optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A). Vascular abnormalities that do not affect dye filling or produce leakage may also remain undetected.

Optokinetic / Optomotor Response

Measures a reflexive head or eye movement tracking a moving pattern, giving a rapid, training-free behavioral estimate of spatial vision and contrast sensitivity in an animal that cannot report them. It is driven largely by reflex circuitry and reports on the visual pathway as a whole, so a deficit it detects still has to be localized by a structural or electrophysiological method, or separated from cortical processing by an operant task.

Intravitreal Injection / Delivery

Injection into the vitreous places a substance directly into the vitreous at a known administered dose and chosen time, reducing but not eliminating systemic exposure. The injectate may be a therapeutic compound, cell preparation or viral vector, or an agent used to create the model, such as a toxin, vasoactive or excitotoxic compound, or infectious inoculum. The route bypasses surface-delivery barriers and provides direct access to the vitreous and posterior segment, but the concentration reached in a particular ocular tissue depends on distribution and clearance and is not fixed by the injected dose alone. It is invasive and discrete: each repeat dose or challenge requires another injection, and vehicle- or sham-injected controls can help separate effects of the injectate from effects of the procedure.

Which MICRON systems and add-ons appear?

Which strains and genetic lines are used?

What other conditions are recorded on the same papers?

Which MICRON configurations appear in this work?

Configurations recorded in these papers, and the techniques recorded alongside them.

The papers

Browse all hubs at MICRON Research Hubs. The full corpus is searchable in the reSEARCH portal.