“It’s an important foundational paper.” Strands of dilator muscles (red) weave through the mouse iris. “This is the first comprehensive and in-depth study of mouse iris tissue,” says Bo Chen, an eye researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who wasn’t involved in the research. The work could also guide engineering of healthy iris cells used to replace diseased cells elsewhere in the eye. The researchers’ cell-by-cell map of the iris could one day help identify genes involved in iris-related eye disorders. His team identified eight types of iris cells and uncovered new information about iris cell development and the genes that switch on when the pupil dilates, they report November 16, 2021, in the journal eLife. The trio was motivated by the beauty of the iris, the diversity of iris structure in different animals, and its importance for vision, Nathans says. He and his colleagues Jie Wang and Amir Rattner have now developed a high-resolution map of the mouse iris that distinguishes individual cells by the activity of their genes. “The basic biology of the iris had kind of languished,” Nathans says. In fact, he has spent most of his career studying the molecular biology of the retina. Though the iris – the colorful tissue that rings the pupil – comes in a rainbow of showy shades, for most scientists, “it was not the main attraction in the eye,” says Jeremy Nathans, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. And it’s not as high-profile as the lens, which can cloud with cataracts as people age. It doesn’t get as much limelight as the retina, the eye’s light-sensing tissue. If vision science were a movie, the iris would be a supporting actor. Scientists have now built the first cell-by-cell map of this eye tissue. Branching nerve fibers (red) stretch across the mouse iris.
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