Mouse Models of Color Vision Defects 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 Color Vision Defects

In people, color vision defects run from inherited anomalies of the cone opsins, through achromatopsia and the cone dysfunction syndromes, to discrimination lost as a consequence of another retinal or optic nerve disease.

Color Vision Defects in Experimental Research

The mouse is dichromatic, with an ultraviolet-shifted short-wavelength opsin and a middle-wavelength opsin and no long-wavelength opsin, so the red-green discrimination that inherited human color vision deficiency most often concerns has no counterpart in it to be lost.

What a mouse does carry is cone photoreceptor function and its failure, read from the photopic and flicker electroretinogram, from opsin-specific stimuli, and from behavioral discrimination tasks built around wavelengths the mouse can actually separate.

A result on this facet in a mouse is best read as a statement about cone function rather than about color perception as a clinical category.

Mouse Models of Color Vision Defects

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: Color Vision Defects in Mice

This page lists 4 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2018 to 2026, that study color vision defects in mice.

Of these publications:

• 4 studies used mice as the primary color vision defects 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 color vision defects 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.

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.