Mouse Models of Dry Eye 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 Dry Eye Disease

Dry eye disease is a disorder of the tear film and the ocular surface, and it is understood as a self-sustaining loop rather than as a single lesion: an unstable tear film and a hyperosmolar tear, inflammation and damage of the surface epithelium, and abnormality of the nerves that both sense the surface and drive its secretions each act on the others, so that whichever of them begins, the rest tend to follow.

The epithelial damage and ocular surface inflammation this disease produces are also the subject matter of work described as corneal injury and repair, and of work described as keratitis, and where the boundary between those descriptions falls is read differently by different authors.

Dry Eye Disease in Experimental Research

Animal models produce that surface disease by several routes, among them:

• Desiccating environmental stress
• Pharmacological suppression of tear secretion
• Chemical insult from a preserved topical agent
• Autoimmune backgrounds in which the lacrimal gland is itself a target

In a mouse eye the reduced tear volume, the unstable film, the corneal epithelial damage and the inflammatory infiltration of surface and lacrimal tissue can be produced and measured.

What such a model cannot produce is the complaint: in people the condition presents as discomfort, dryness, burning, grittiness and vision that fluctuates and clears on a blink, the presence of symptoms is part of what current consensus definitions require for the diagnosis rather than something the signs are taken to entail, and an animal cannot report any of it.

Behavioral assays stand in for that reported experience, since eye-wipe and blink responses, light aversion and thresholds for corneal mechanical and chemical stimulation can be measured in an animal, but they record nociception and reflex rather than a described sensation, and symptoms and clinical signs are weakly correlated in human cohorts, so a model that reproduces the surface signs faithfully does not thereby settle what an intervention does on the axis a patient reports and a trial in this disease has to satisfy separately.

Mouse Models of Dry Eye 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: Dry Eye Disease in Mice

This page lists 8 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2014 to 2026, that study dry eye disease in mice.

Of these publications:

• 8 studies used mice as the primary dry eye 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 dry eye 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.

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.

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).

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.