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Obstructive nephropathy is the most important cause of renal failure in children. Unilateral ureteral obstruction (UUO) in the neonatal mouse provides a useful model to investigate the response of the developing kidney to urine flow obstruction. Creation of reversible variable par ...

Ultrasound (US) is the most common and least invasive modality for clinical imaging of the kidney. One important application of US in nephrology is the detection and monitoring of structural changes in the kidney. Recent advances in US technology have facilitated the application of similar ...

Lower urinary tract obstruction in mice can lead to end-stage renal disease and death. We have developed a surgical technique to create a cutaneous vesicostomy in mice providing an external outlet for drainage of urine, thereby relieving the obstruction and slowing and/or preventing the de ...

Mitochondrial dysfunction and genomic instability are associated with a number of retinal pathologies including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma. Consequences of mitochondrial dysfunction within cells include elevation of the ra ...

The introduction of large-scale gene expression profiling studies has greatly increased the need to rapidly obtain high-quality cellular expression patterns of genes found to exhibit differential expression. The use of large-scale nonradioactive RNA in situ hybridization ma ...

Terminal dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) is an invaluable technique used in the study of late-stage apoptosis. The technique is based upon detection of fragmented DNA, a well-recognized characteristic of apoptosis, usually with fluorescent markers. Here, we describe the TUNEL technique ...

Various types of retinal neurons, including amacrine, ganglion, and horizontal cells, expand neurites (dendrites or axons) in horizontal direction and make synaptic or electrical contacts with other cells to integrate the visual information. Many types of ion-channels and recept ...

Identification and visualization of specific cells and cellular structures in the retina are fundamental for understanding the visual process, retinal development, disease progression, and therapeutic intervention. The increased usage of transgenic and naturally occur ...

Disturbances in the general mRNA metabolism have been recognized as a major defect in a growing number of hereditary human diseases. One prominent example of this disease group is Retinitis pigmentosa (RP), characterized by selective loss of photoreceptor cells. RP can be caused by dominant ...

Transgenic models are invaluable tools for researching retinal degenerative disease mechanisms. However, they are time-consuming and expensive to generate and maintain. We have developed an alternative to transgenic rodent models of retinal degeneration using transgenic X ...

The Drosophila compound eye is a regular structure, in which about 750 units, called ommatidia, are arranged in a highly regular pattern. Eye development proceeds in a stereotypical fashion, where epithelial cells of the eye imaginal discs are specified, recruited, and differentiated in a s ...

Large-field movements in the visual surround trigger spontaneous, compensatory eye movements known as optokinetic response (OKR) in all vertebrates. In zebrafish (Danio rerio) the OKR is well developed at 5 days post fertilization and can be used in the laboratory for screening of visual p ...

The animal model of N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA)-induced excitotoxic damage of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) is widely used to study the molecular mechanisms of RGC apoptosis and/or its prevention by neuroprotective agents. This chapter provides protocols for applying NMDA-indu ...

The induction of retinal degeneration by light exposure is widely used to study mechanisms of cell death. The advantage of such light-induced lesions over genetically determined degenerations is that light exposures can be manipulated according to the needs of the experimenter. Brig ...

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an invaluable technique to perform noninvasive retinal imaging in small animal models such as mice. It provides virtual cross sections that correlate well with histomorphometric data with the advantage that multiple iterative measurements ...

In many situations it is important to be able to assess the degree of retinal function, e.g., for the characterization of mouse models with unknown retinal involvement, when studying degenerative processes, for the analysis of visual signal processing, and during the follow-up of therapeut ...

The development of in vivo retinal fundus imaging in mice has opened a new research horizon, not only in ophthalmic research. The ability to monitor the dynamics of vascular and cellular changes in pathological conditions, such as neovascularization or degeneration, longitudinally wi ...

Mouse models, with their well-developed genetics and similarity to human physiology and anatomy, serve as powerful tools with which to investigate the etiology of human retinal degeneration. Mutant mice also provide reproducible, experimental systems for elucidating pathways ...

Inherited retinal diseases display a very high degree of clinical and genetic heterogeneity, which poses challenges in identifying the underlying defects in known genes and in identifying novel retinal disease genes. Here, we outline the state-of-the-art techniques to find the causa ...

Counting rhodopsin-positive phagosomes residing in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) in the eye at different times of day allows a quantitative assessment of engulfment and digestion phases of diurnal RPE phagocytosis, which efficiently clears shed photoreceptor outer seg ...