Rat Models of Type 1 Diabetes 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 Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is a systemic endocrine disease: autoimmune destruction of the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas leaves the person insulin-deficient and chronically hyperglycemic. Its relation to the eye is that of a long-term complication.

Sustained hyperglycemia injures the retinal microvasculature and is also associated with neural and glial dysfunction in the retina. It additionally affects the cornea and lens, so the eye is one of the organs in which the damage this disease does becomes visible.

Type 1 Diabetes in Experimental Research

The retina contains a directly observable microvasculature and is neural tissue of the central nervous system, so vascular and neural effects of a systemic metabolic disease can be imaged repeatedly in the living eye. Duration of hyperglycemia is a principal exposure these experiments are built around.

How an animal is made diabetic changes what the model reproduces. Chemical induction, by streptozotocin, destroys beta cells and produces insulin deficiency and hyperglycemia without the autoimmunity that causes the human disease, and it is applied to whatever background strain the experiment otherwise calls for.

Genetic models divide further:

• Spontaneous autoimmune diabetes in the NOD mouse and the BB rat reproduces an immune mechanism as well as the hyperglycemia
• The Ins2Akita mouse carries a misfolded-insulin mutation that fails its beta cells without autoimmunity

What follows in a diabetic rodent eye is early non-proliferative and neurodegenerative change. These animals are not reported to progress to the proliferative retinopathy and macular edema that threaten sight in people, and the mouse and rat retina has no macula in which the second of those could arise.

A paper recorded against this disease is not for that reason a paper about retinopathy: the ocular endpoint may be retinal, corneal or lenticular, or the diabetes may be the systemic condition under which something else was measured.

Rat Models of Type 1 Diabetes

The rat offers a larger eye than the mouse while remaining a small-animal model, which eases injection and imaging without moving to a large species.

Published MICRON Research: Type 1 Diabetes in Rats

This page lists 11 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2014 to 2025, that study type 1 diabetes in rats.

Of these publications:

• 11 studies used rats as the primary type 1 diabetes 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 type 1 diabetes 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).

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.

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.

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.