Mouse Models of Normal-Tension Glaucoma 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 Normal-Tension Glaucoma

Normal-tension glaucoma is glaucomatous optic neuropathy, meaning progressive loss of retinal ganglion cells and their axons with corresponding optic disc and visual field change, occurring while intraocular pressure stays within the statistically normal range.

Because pressure is not raised, this is where glaucomatous damage and intraocular pressure come apart, which is both what makes the entity informative and what makes it awkward to model.

The entity is also studied directly in people, through genetic association and through clinical follow-up of eyes losing field at pressures inside the normal range, so a study of it need not be an animal experiment.

Normal-Tension Glaucoma in Experimental Research

For an animal model to stand in for normal-tension glaucoma, ganglion cell loss has to be produced while pressure stays inside that range, and the routes described in the literature for doing that include genetic ones, with glutamate transporter deficient and optineurin lines as examples.

What such a model supplies is the ganglion cell and axonal degeneration itself, its time course, and its response to intervention, followed as inner retinal layer thinning and as electrophysiological change.

What it does not supply is the human definition, which rests on pressure readings sitting inside a population distribution and on perimetric field loss:

• A mouse carries its own pressure distribution rather than the human one
• It cannot report a percept, so perimetry has no direct counterpart in it

The defining negative depends on a measurement rather than on a design, so where intraocular pressure is not recorded across the period of degeneration, a model of this disease is not separable from any other pressure-independent optic neuropathy.

Mouse Models of Normal-Tension Glaucoma

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: Normal-Tension Glaucoma in Mice

This page lists 3 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2016 to 2022, that study normal-tension glaucoma in mice.

Of these publications:

• 3 studies used mice as the primary normal-tension glaucoma 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 normal-tension glaucoma 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).

AAV-Mediated Ocular Gene Delivery

An adeno-associated viral vector delivers genetic material to ocular cells, and a single administration can support long-lived transgene expression. That persistence is useful for gene augmentation and sustained therapeutic-protein expression; AAV can also deliver gene-silencing or genome-editing cargo, where long-lived expression of the editing machinery may be unnecessary or undesirable. Capsid and route of delivery jointly determine which cells are reached, so different delivery routes and vector designs give different distributions.

CRISPR-Based Ocular Gene Editing

Uses a programmable genome-editing system to alter DNA at an endogenous locus rather than adding a separate replacement copy. Depending on the editor and design, it can disrupt, correct or install a sequence, either therapeutically or to create an experimental model. Once a genomic sequence change is established, the edit itself cannot be withdrawn like a dose; where the edit is present from conception, the resulting phenotype also reflects its effects throughout development. Off-target sequence changes are a separate question that structural imaging does not establish.

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.

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.