The Annual CVS Research Symposium will be held on Friday, January 6, 2012 in Valley Hall, Room 1041. The theme this year is "Molecular Genetics of Eye Disease". We will be having two distinguished speakers, Eric Pierce, MD, PhD from MEEI/Harvard, and Neeraj Agarwal, PhD, the Program Director for Glaucoma and Optic Neuropathies, as well as the training programs at the National Eye Institute. This is a perfect opportunity to hear about the big changes in research and funding, and to showcase vision research at UCD. Please plan to attend!

Dr. Ivan Schwab has published a stunning new book entitled Evolution's Witness: How Eyes Evolved. In his book, Dr. Schwab presents the evolutionary history of the eye in great detail, tracking back 4600 million years ago, before the development of the first known eye, to the present. The book can be found and purchased here, and Dr. Schwab’s blog can be found here.

UC Davis vision scientists, Dr. Robert Zawadzki and colleagues, have described a new method for achieving ultrahigh-resolution images of retinal cells within the human eye. By acquiring images using both adaptive optics Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) and adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopes (AO-SLO) and co-registering them with powerful software, features within the human retina could be visualized at less than 4 μm resolution. This advance may improve diagnosis and the monitoring of disease progression in clinical settings. The article can be found here.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) remains one of the most prevalent causes of blindness around the world. In a recent review article, UC Davis Vision scientist Dr. Larry Hjelmeland summarizes the molecular mechanisms by which environmental and genetic risk factors alter gene expression dynamically and contribute to AMD and other complex diseases. The article can be found here.

A commonplace misapprehension about mice is that they have poor vision, and in particular, that as “nocturnal animals” that they have negligible cone vision. A recent quantitative behavioral investigation by Frank Naarendorp of Northeastern University, Ed Pugh of UC Davis and colleagues published in the Journal of Neuroscience has shown the common view to be completely wrong. [More...]