Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
A team of scientists in China just took a big step toward developing technology that could one day restore vision to the blind.
Researchers at Fudan University and the University of Science and Technology of China recently published a paper in Nature Communications that outlines how they used artificial photoreceptors to restore vision to blind mice.
Photoreceptors are structures that translate light into neural signals for the brain. They’re able to do this because they contain chemicals that change when light hits them, which produces an electrical signal that’s sent to the brain along the optic nerve.
For the study, the team genetically engineered a group of mice to develop progressively degraded photoreceptors, similar to eye diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration in humans. This left the mice’s eyes and visual processing systems intact, but rendered visual signals unable to reach the brain.
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