Retina regeneration takes place in a variety of organisms including teleost fish, birds and amphibians. Our lab uses the embryonic chick and  amphibians to study mechanisms of  retina regeneration.

The chick can regenerate the entire retina during a short window of its development. Upon retina removal, the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) located behind the neural retina undergoes reprogramming. In this process the RPE dedifferentiates, losing its characteristics of origin and creating a neuroepithelium that can later differentiate into the cells that comprise the neural retina including photoreceptor, amacrine, bipolar, horizontal, ganglion cells and Mueller glia cells. The retina can also regenerate via the activation of stem/progenitor cells located in the anterior margin of the eye. 

Newts on the other hand,  can regenerate their retina mostly via RPE reprogramming at any time of their life span. Other amphibian models such as axolotls are also been explored in the lab and their regenerative ability is being assessed.

 

We are interested to determine which signaling pathways and epigenetic programs are key regulators in the process of regeneration, so that one day we could try to induce this ability in higher vertebrates including humans. This could be very beneficial in the cure/treatment of so many of the retinal degenerative diseases.