Retinal Involvement in Mouse Models of Multiple Sclerosis 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 Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic immune-mediated disease of the central nervous system, in which inflammatory demyelination and neuro-axonal loss occur in the brain, the spinal cord and the optic nerve. In a person it runs as a course over years rather than as a single event.

This gate names its retinal side, and that side is reached largely through the anterior visual pathway:

• Optic neuritis is a common event in multiple sclerosis
• The retinal nerve fiber layer and the ganglion cell layer of an affected eye thin in the months after an episode
• Thinning is also reported in eyes with no history of optic neuritis
• Because those layers can be measured repeatedly in a living eye they have been taken up as outcome measures in multiple sclerosis research beside clinical and cerebral ones

Multiple Sclerosis in Experimental Research

Animal models reproduce selected components of multiple sclerosis through several routes:

• Active or adoptive-transfer experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis models immune-mediated demyelination
• Toxin models isolate demyelination and repair
• Transgenic autoimmune systems can develop spontaneous disease

Their clinical courses also vary: some preparations are monophasic, some chronic and some relapsing-remitting. No one preparation reproduces the unknown initiating cause, anatomical heterogeneity and decades-long natural history of human multiple sclerosis, so results have to be read against the particular model and disease phase used.

What a model supplies is a demyelinating process in a pathway that can be examined from outside the animal: the optic nerve and retina can be measured before it, while injury and repair develop, and after an agent given at a chosen point, in one animal followed over time and closed against tissue at the end.

The human retinal endpoint is also partly macular, since macular ganglion cell layer thickness is read beside peripapillary nerve fiber layer thickness, and a mouse retina has no macula, so work in this species can report ganglion cell and axonal loss and the visual function that goes with it, but not that macular measurement, and not the acuity, contrast and visual field measures that a patient performs.

Retinal Involvement in Mouse Models of Multiple Sclerosis

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: Multiple Sclerosis in Mice

This page lists 4 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2022 to 2025, that study multiple sclerosis with retinal involvement in mice.

Of these publications:

• 4 studies used mice as the primary multiple sclerosis with retinal involvement 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 multiple sclerosis with retinal involvement 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).

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.

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.