Mouse Models of Retinal Detachment 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 Retinal Detachment

Retinal detachment is separation of the neurosensory retina from the retinal pigment epithelium beneath it, which separates photoreceptors from RPE support and increases their distance from the choroidal circulation on which the outer retina largely depends.

It is classified by how the separation arises:

• Rhegmatogenous, following a break in the retina
• Tractional, where contracting membrane pulls the retina away
• Exudative, where fluid collects beneath a retina that is intact

Separation also arises as a feature of disease processes studied for other reasons, exudative beneath neovascular, inflammatory or tumor lesions and tractional alongside fibrovascular proliferation, so the same finding is recorded in literatures whose subject is something else.

Retinal Detachment in Experimental Research

Separation and subretinal fluid are directly visible in cross-section, while photoreceptor loss and reduced retinal function provide structural and functional consequences that can be followed with imaging and electrophysiology.

Animal work on detachment divides by eye size:

• In a small eye a separation can be produced reproducibly, for instance by a subretinal injection that lifts the retina off its epithelium, and what such a preparation supplies is mechanism, meaning the death of photoreceptors deprived of their epithelium, the glial and immune response that accompanies it, and whether an intervention alters either
• In an eye approaching human dimensions the same separation can be created and then repaired with instruments close to those used clinically, and what those preparations supply is the procedure: how the retina is reattached, how a break is sealed, and whether a device or a maneuver works in a globe with the working space to accommodate it

What this work does not supply is the axis on which a human detachment is judged, because whether the macula has separated governs both urgency and how much vision returns after anatomically successful repair, and the species used here have no macula and cannot report what they see, so acuity and visual field outcomes have no direct counterpart in them.

Mouse Models of Retinal Detachment

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: Retinal Detachment in Mice

This page lists 39 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2012 to 2026, that study retinal detachment in mice.

Of these publications:

• 37 studies used mice as the primary retinal detachment disease model.
• 2 studies used healthy animals to assess pharmacokinetics, drug delivery, or tolerability.

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 retinal detachment 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.

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.

Laser Photocoagulation Models

A laser lesion provokes a reproducible, quantifiable injury at a known time and place. Wavelength, power, duration, spot size, pulse mode, focus and lesion location together determine the injury produced, allowing laser exposure to be configured for different experimental endpoints. It is an induced injury, not the disease: it produces a lesion directly, bypassing the process that gives rise to comparable damage in patients.

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.

Ocular Blast Injury

Experimental ocular blast models expose the eye, or in some paradigms the head with ocular outcomes measured, to a controlled overpressure wave at a known time. Peak pressure, waveform and impulse, exposure number, orientation and interval help determine the loading delivered to the eye. A blast wave can injure multiple ocular compartments, including anterior structures, retina and optic nerve, although the pattern and severity depend on the exposure paradigm and the animal. Eye-directed paradigms that shield the head and body are used to isolate primary blast effects on the eye; head-directed or less-confined paradigms may also involve central nervous-system and other traumatic-brain-injury mechanisms and should not be treated as equivalent. Because the exposure is known, interventions can be tested against it and sham exposures can help distinguish effects of the pressure wave from handling or the experimental procedure. Apparatus design, waveform, positioning and shielding materially affect the delivered exposure, so nominal pressure values or exposure counts should not be assumed directly comparable across laboratories or equivalent to human blast exposure without physical characterization.

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

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