Mouse Models of Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy 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 Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy

Proliferative vitreoretinopathy is a scarring response within the eye: retinal pigment epithelial cells, glia and fibroblast-like cells reach the vitreous cavity and the retinal surfaces, change character, proliferate and lay down a fibrocellular membrane.

What makes that membrane a disease is that it contracts, and the traction it exerts stiffens and distorts the retina and can pull it away from the epithelium beneath it.

The condition is described:

• In eyes with a retinal break
• After ocular trauma
• After retinal detachment and its surgical repair

Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy in Experimental Research

One step that draws sustained experimental attention is the transition of retinal pigment epithelial cells to a migratory, contractile phenotype, driven by growth factors and serum proteins that a compromised blood-retinal barrier admits into the vitreous.

An animal model is built by starting that process rather than waiting for it: placing cells, an enzyme or a growth factor in the vitreous, or inflicting a penetrating injury, begins membrane formation at a known moment in an eye that can be imaged repeatedly, which is what makes the cellular cascade and its response to anti-proliferative or anti-fibrotic treatment testable.

Two limits apply to translation:

• What such a model does not supply is the clinical course it stands for, which in people unfolds over weeks to months and whose endpoints are surgical and functional: whether the retina can be reattached and kept attached, and what vision is regained
• The rodent eye also has a small vitreous compartment occupied largely by the lens, so the volume in which these membranes form and are operated on in people is not reproduced at scale

Mouse Models of Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy

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: Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy in Mice

This page lists 9 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2017 to 2025, that study proliferative vitreoretinopathy in mice.

Of these publications:

• 9 studies used mice as the primary proliferative vitreoretinopathy 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 proliferative vitreoretinopathy 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.