Scientists grow human eye retina to understand color vision

In order to know more about human color vision, researchers have successfully grown human retinas in dish.

Scientists from Johns Hopkins University have grown human retina tissue from scratch in a Petri dish for their experiment to understand how the cells that allow us to see in color are formed. With this innovation, researchers also hope to be able to form therapies for eye diseases such as color blindness or macular generation.

One of the researchers Robert Johnston explained, “Everything we examine looks like a normal developing eye, just growing in a dish. You have a model system that you can manipulate without studying humans directly.”

Oxford student invents artificial retina

According to Digital Journal, the researchers have started testing the lab-grown retina to identify how most people can distinguish between the three cone photoreceptors of human eye; red, green and blue.

The retina tissues created from stem cells took few months to grow, during which it was noted that the blue-detecting cells materialized first, followed by red and then green detecting ones. They found that the process used to control this was the release of thyroid hormone, which dictated if the cells became blue or red or green, and the eye tissue itself controlled the level of the thyroid hormone. This indicated that babies born with lowered thyroid hormone levels are more likely to develop color blindness.

Moreover, once the researchers figured out how the amount of thyroid hormone dictated whether the cells become blue, green or red receptors, they could manipulate the outcome and create retinas that would have seen only blue or retinas seeing only red or green, as per Futurity.

As per the study published in the journal Science, the researchers would further like to use artificially grown organ tissue called ‘organoids’ in order to learn more about color vision and processes involved in the creation of other regions of the retina.