Mouse Models of Retinal Dysplasia 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 Dysplasia

Retinal dysplasia names disordered development of the retina rather than the loss of a retina that formed normally: during histogenesis the layers fail to assemble in register, and the result is folds and rosettes, which are circular arrangements of photoreceptors around a small lumen.

That developmental origin is what the label asserts, and it is harder to establish than the appearance suggests, because rosetted and folded retina is also described in degenerating and in detached retina, so histology does not by itself date a lesion to the period when the retina was being built.

Retinal Dysplasia in Experimental Research

Mouse lines that show dysplastic lesions early can go on to lose photoreceptors, so one animal supports both descriptions, and whether such a line is read as a developmental disorder with a degenerative sequel or as a degeneration whose earliest sign is dysplastic is answered differently across this literature. The same reservation holds among the developmental disorders themselves: folds and dysplastic retina are reported alongside a persistent fetal vascular stalk and alongside an incompletely vascularized peripheral retina, where a mechanical or vascular account of the same appearance is available, and reports differ over whether to call that retina dysplastic or to describe it under the primary abnormality.

What a mouse offers here is access to the developmental window itself: much of murine retinal lamination occurs after birth, so a gene can be altered before the layers form and the affected step can be followed in a living eye, with the resulting lesion tracked by cross-sectional imaging and its functional cost measured electrophysiologically.

What a mouse does not offer is the human clinical setting:

• Mice have no macula, so the part of the human picture that turns on whether central retina is involved has no counterpart here
• Retinal dysplasia in people is often recognized in an infant and within a syndromic or infectious context, which is not what a mouse study assesses

Mouse Models of Retinal Dysplasia

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 Dysplasia in Mice

This page lists 16 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2012 to 2026, that study retinal dysplasia in mice.

Of these publications:

• 16 studies used mice as the primary retinal dysplasia 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 retinal dysplasia 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).

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.

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?

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.