Stay updated with breaking news from Alejandra bosco. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
The paper PNAS, 117:30661–69, 2020. Staring at her images of neurons in living humans’ eyes, Zhuolin Liu got an inkling that she could also see traces of another cell type on the surface of the retina. The images came from a study completed as part of her postdoctoral research at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington, and though the focus of that work had been neurons in the retina, the glimpse she got of what looked like macrophages led her to wonder if she and her colleagues could get a better view of the immune cells and probe their dynamics. Macrophages on the surface of the retina look and act like microglia, the sentinels of the central nervous system. They had been studied extensively in rodents but haven’t been visualized in real time in the eyes of living humans. Doing so, says her collaborator Daniel Hammer, a researcher at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), would offer a better understanding of how they protect the eye. “People are familiar ....