Rat Models of Type 2 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 2 Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is a systemic metabolic disease in which insulin resistance, together with a relative rather than absolute failure of insulin secretion, produces sustained hyperglycemia, often alongside obesity and dyslipidemia.

Its damage accumulates in small vessels and in nerve tissue, and reaches the kidney, the peripheral nerves, the cornea, the lens and the retina.

Type 2 Diabetes in Experimental Research

Retinal vessels and retinal neurons can be observed directly and repeatedly in a living animal, which is why a systemic disease key sits over ocular imaging work: a paper carrying this key may be following the vascular lesions of diabetic retinopathy, the neural and functional changes reported in the diabetic retina, a different ocular complication such as corneal nerve loss or lens opacity, or the retina as an accessible reporter on a whole-body disease. Whether those neural changes are an early stage of diabetic retinopathy or a process running alongside it is argued both ways in the literature and is not settled here.

Rodent models of type 2 diabetes in common use include:

• Obese leptin-pathway mutants such as db/db and ob/ob lines and their congenic backgrounds
• Diet-induced models on ordinary inbred or outbred stock
• Non-obese polygenic lines selected for spontaneous hyperglycemia such as the Goto-Kakizaki rat

Each reproduces part of the human metabolic picture and each departs from it, since human type 2 diabetes emerges over years on a genetically heterogeneous background and against variable treatment. Duration is the bound that matters to a retinal readout. Rodent studies compress the years-long human exposure into months, although some models are followed for a year or longer.

What these models supply is the early end of diabetic eye disease, vascular permeability, inner retinal thinning and functional loss, rather than the advanced endpoints that threaten sight in people, among them proliferative disease and diabetic macular edema. Mouse and rat retinas have no macula, so diabetic macular edema, a leading cause of vision loss in human diabetic eye disease, has no anatomical counterpart in this work.

Rat Models of Type 2 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 2 Diabetes in Rats

This page lists 4 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2014 to 2025, that study type 2 diabetes in rats.

Of these publications:

• 4 studies used rats as the primary type 2 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 2 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).

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.

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.

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.