Study helps explain how zebrafish recover from blinding injuries
"This work opens up new ideas for therapies for blinding diseases and has implications for the broader field of regenerative medicine," said Tom Greenwell, Ph.D., NEI program officer for retinal neuroscience. For years, vision scientists have studied zebrafish to understand their retinal regenerative capacity. Zebrafish easily recover from retinal injuries that would permanently blind a person. Early studies in zebrafish led to the idea that dying retinal cells release signals that trigger support cells in the retinal called Muller glia to dedifferentiate -- return to a stem-like state -- and proliferate. However, recent studies in the mouse brain and pancreas suggest GABA, a well-characterized neurotransmitter, might also play an important role in regeneration, distinct from its role in communicating local signals from one neuron to the next. Scientists studying a part of the brain called the hippocampus found that GABA levels regulate the activity of neural stem cell...