Mouse Models of Fungal Keratitis 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 Fungal Keratitis

Fungal keratitis is infection of the cornea by filamentous fungi such as Fusarium and Aspergillus species, or by yeasts such as Candida. Across much of the world it follows an injury that drives plant or other vegetative material into the eye, so it falls on agricultural populations of working age and is a leading cause of infectious corneal blindness in those regions.

Two features make it hard to treat and they compound each other:

• Antifungal drugs cross an intact cornea poorly
• The organism grows into the depth of the stroma rather than staying at the surface, so a concentration that would clear a superficial infection need not reach the hyphae

Fungal Keratitis in Experimental Research

An animal model puts organism, host response and drug exposure together in one living cornea in which the isolate and the host can each be specified, so the fungal genes required to establish and sustain a corneal infection can be tested by deleting them, and a candidate treatment can be assessed against fungal burden in infected tissue with the barrier that defeats treatment in patients present rather than assumed.

Because the cornea lies at the surface of the eye and is transparent while healthy, the infiltrate, its depth and the swelling around it can be followed in one eye over the course of an infection, and that same opacity lies in the light path of any measurement made of the retina behind it.

What a model of this kind does not supply is the clinical course: infection in people is often recognized days or weeks after the injury that seeded it, in a cornea of different thickness and layered structure, and the outcomes that decide a case, acuity through a residual scar, sustained topical dosing over weeks, and whether corneal transplantation is needed, are clinical measures rather than laboratory ones.

Mouse Models of Fungal Keratitis

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: Fungal Keratitis in Mice

This page lists 8 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2022 to 2026, that study fungal keratitis in mice.

Of these publications:

• 8 studies used mice as the primary fungal keratitis 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 fungal keratitis 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

Which other species appear alongside?

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.