Mouse Models of Persistent Fetal Vasculature 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 Persistent Fetal Vasculature

Persistent fetal vasculature is a failure of the embryonic hyaloid vascular system and the primary vitreous to regress, so vessels that supplied the developing lens and inner eye remain in place after the eye is otherwise formed.

In people it is present at birth, is reported predominantly as unilateral and sporadic, and is accompanied in varying combination by:

• A retrolental fibrovascular remnant
• A small globe
• Cataract
• Traction on the retina
• Secondary glaucoma

Persistent Fetal Vasculature in Experimental Research

What makes an animal model of persistent fetal vasculature tractable is timing: in people hyaloid regression and the vascularization of the retina are largely complete by term, whereas in the mouse both run on after birth, across roughly the first two to three postnatal weeks, so a sequence that is intrauterine in the human is open to serial observation in the living eye and to intervention dated from birth.

What such a model supplies is that sequence, meaning:

• The vascular and immune events that dismantle the hyaloid bed
• The consequences of removing or restoring a gene at a defined point in it
• A phenotype that can be followed repeatedly in one animal as it resolves or fails to

What it does not supply is the clinical problem, because a mouse performs after birth what a human fetus performs before it, so a treatment window demonstrated postnatally in an animal is not a window available in an infant whose eye is already malformed when it is first examined, and the terms in which the human disease is judged, the surgical result, the management of amblyopia and the vision a child ends up with, have no counterpart in a mouse.

Incomplete or delayed hyaloid regression is in addition a frequent incidental finding in laboratory mice, reported on inbred backgrounds and in lines made to study something else, so persistent hyaloid vessels in an animal are a developmental observation rather than, in themselves, evidence that the line models the human disease. The hyaloid system regresses while the retinal vascular beds are still being laid down, and in the mouse the two overlap in the same postnatal weeks, so a mutation that disturbs one is frequently recorded as disturbing the other, and where persistent fetal vasculature ends and a primary abnormality of retinal vascular development begins is drawn differently by different authors.

Mouse Models of Persistent Fetal Vasculature

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: Persistent Fetal Vasculature in Mice

This page lists 9 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2012 to 2023, that study persistent fetal vasculature in mice.

Of these publications:

• 9 studies used mice as the primary persistent fetal vasculature 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 persistent fetal vasculature 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.