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The conversion of wavelengths of light into information useful to the brain requires a tremendous degree of anatomic and functional specialization. The mammalian retina is a remarkably refined and adapted tissue that is capable of light detection, processing, and transmission of inf ...

Here we review both established and emerging approaches for studying retinal diseases. We primarily focus on the use of the mouse as a genetic model, as it is a mammalian model with many resources and is amenable to a variety of genetic manipulations. Additionally, we highlight two other organisms, ...

Glaucoma is a relatively common disease in which the pathological death of retinal ganglion cells causes progressive losses of sight, often leading to blindness. The diagnosis of glaucoma and the assessment of progression are based on a clinical quantification of the ocular characteri ...

The generation and advancement of animal models have contributed significantly to the advancement of glaucoma research. This chapter describes and summarizes major nonprimate animal models useful for the study of this disease. Rodent models, both rats and mice, have been popular for gl ...

Diabetic retinopathy threatens vision in millions of patients in the USA. Prolonged hyperglycemia causes irreversible pathological changes in the retina, leading to proliferative diabetic retinopathy with preretinal neovascularization and diabetic macular edema. Mu ...

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), a condition affecting premature infants, is characterized by pathological angiogenesis, or neovascularization (NV), of the retina. Much of what is known about the development of the retinal vasculature and the progression of ROP has been learned thr ...

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) has a number of characteristic features including late onset and accumulation of deposits (drusen) below the retinal pigment epithelium on Bruch’s membrane in the macula. A progressive increase in these deposits (in some individuals) leads to m ...

Retinal degeneration is often used to describe a category of human eye diseases, which are characterized by photoreceptor loss leading to severe visual impairment and blindness. An important, yet heterogeneous group of such diseases is called Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). To understand ...

The promoter regions of many detoxification enzymes contain a cis-acting enhancer known as the antioxidant response element (ARE). NF-E2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) is considered as one of the major transcription factors for the ARE. Nrf2-dependent transcriptional activation by means of ...

NF-κB/Rel transcription factors are critical regulators of immunity, inflammation, development, and cell survival. Activation of NF-κB inhibits programmed cell death (PCD) triggered by tumor necrosis factor α (TNFα) and several other stimuli. The prosurvival activity of NF-κB is a ...

Mitochondrial dysfunction has been increasingly shown as a critical process that makes certain areas of the brain more susceptible not only to neurological disease but also to aging. Quantitative histochemistry is a series of procedures for measuring select metabolites in discrete ...

Here, we describe the use of a functional cloning approach, based on the screen of a genomewide short hairpin RNA (shRNA) library, to identify novel genes regulating apoptosis in neuronal cells. Apoptosis is induced by doxorubicin and is detected with a fluorometric caspase 3 assay. Moreover, we ...

Organotypic slice cultures of the brain are widely used as a tool to study fundamental questions in neuroscience. In this chapter, we focus on a protocol based on organotypic slice cultures of mouse entorhinal cortex and hippocampus that can be employed to study axonal regeneration and collat ...

A major causative factor in the paralysis that often follows an acute injury to the central nervous system (CNS) is the paradoxical inability of the CNS to tolerate its own mechanism of self-repair. The dismal result is often a wider spread of damage (part of the inevitable “secondary” or “delayed” de ...

Silver impregnation histological techniques yield excellent visualization of degenerating neurons and their processes in animal models of neurological diseases. These methods also provide a particularly valuable complement to current immunocytochemical techniq ...

Neurodegenerative disorders are subjects of intense scrutiny in biomedical research because of their often-debilitating effects. Currently, many laboratories are engaged in developing or testing drugs to prevent neuronal loss in a variety of these pathologies. A key to testing su ...

To achieve neuroprotection is one of the main interests for neuroscientist: understanding the control mechanisms of neuronal death allows developing new tools for preventing it. Neuronal death plays a critical role in most of the important neural pathologies, including stroke, epil ...

Noninvasive tomographic imaging methods including positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are extremely sensitive and are capable of measuring biochemical processes that occur at concentrations in the nanomolar range. I ...

Cell degeneration and death, be it extensive and widespread, such as in metabolic disorders, or focal and selective as in Parkinson’s disease (PD), is the underlying feature of many neurological diseases. Thus, the replacement of cells lost by injury or disease has become a central tenet in strate ...

Short basic amino acid sequences, often called cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs), allow the delivery of proteins and other molecules into cells and across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Although the ability of basic proteins to facilitate such trafficking is known for a long time, only the ap ...