According to Daily Kos, retinal neuron degeneration is a frequent result of aging in animals. Glaucoma’s degenerative effects may be directed at retinal ganglion cells, rods, and cones (photoreceptors).
Humanity finally developed a reasoning intellect and a will to survive. These features enable humans to compensate for some of their evolutionary flaws. Human retinal “organoids,” or little balls with all the required cells grouped in the proper layers, may now be grown from stem cells.
The cells in the retina can connect on their own if the organoid is divided into its component cells. Retinal cells produced from a patient’s stem cells and reapplied to the patient’s retina would be a potential new treatment option for blindness.
Gamm’s team revealed last year that rods and cones generated from stem cells respond to light similarly to their healthy counterparts. That’s fantastic for isolating cells for therapy, but rods and cones still need a method to communicate with the rest of the retina for vision to function. Gamm and Zhao were intrigued by the potential of reconstructing damaged retinal regions from stem cells since all of the cells in the RO develop the layers they should and make connections inside the RO.
After papain treatment, the proteins essential for synapse activity remained, but they were now tucked deep inside the cells. The synapses may be restored if the cells can find their way again.RO cells were cultivated on a plate that resembled the retina for 20 days. The innovative approach of “synaptic tracking” is used to detect whether neuronal synapses are active.
Because the rabies virus can only pass through fully functioning synapses, it might be used as a diagnostic tool to detect whether or not synapses exist and how much they are used. (The rabies virus should be added to the list of things not to rub in your eyes.)
This is intriguing; towards the conclusion, photographs portray the events. To begin, they isolated a fraction of cells infected by the rabies virus without wiping out the entire culture. They started with lentivirus, which has a GFP gene exclusive to the nucleus. A massive green dot will appear in the center of infected cells. They can experiment with different lentivirus dosages to infect 5% of our cells.
TVA and Rgp will be added to the lentivirus, but the explanation will be provided later. They also wanted to infect cells with the rabies virus while modifying the gene encoding the virus’s coat protein. Env will be used in place of Rgp. TVA is necessary for a viral infection that employs Env. Thus, they incorporated it into our green-dot cells. The rabies virus could previously infect any cell, but now it can only infect green dots.
They put a gene for mCherry (a red luminous protein) into the rabies virus to make infected cells fluorescently red. The green-dot “beginning” cells will catch rabies and become red and green since they all contain TVA. Because the lentivirus carries the Rgp gene, green dot cells make the Rgp protein.
Only cells with functioning synapses can be infected and mutated into the red by the 5% of our red and green cells that are “starter” cells. In this situation, they would see non-viable rabies cells, red cells with no green dot.
