The individual components of the eye work in unison, with each part playing a vital role in providing clear vision.  The cornea acts as the eye’s main focusing segment.  It takes a widely diverging ray of light and bends it through the pupil which is surrounded by the colored iris.  The eye is very complex, and with this complexity various problems can occur.  With new technology, doctors are able to restore many forms of impaired vision.

A new study completed in Kobe, Japan looked into the development of mammalian eyes from stem cells.  Yoshiki Sasai grew what is now known as an optic cup using human stem cells.  This breakthrough was encouraging due to the ability for Sasai to grow three-dimensional tissues unlike the two-deminsional sheets that were being developed.  Observing the optic cup, structural similarities were seen when compared to normal development of an human in vitro eye.  Sasai was impressed to notice that layers of the eye were grown in the same sequence without his aid.

This new achievement could aid scientists in a clinical setting aiding to the increased successes in transplanting stem cell photoreceptors into mice.  This transplant only offered rod receptors that would only give unclear images.  Sasai’s optic cup is being looked at to one day integrate both photoreceptor tissues into humans.

Yoshiki, Sasai, Eiraku Mototsugu, et al. “Self-organizing optic-cup morphogenesis in three-dimensional culture.” Nature. 472.7341 (2010): 51-56. Web. 28 Jan. 2013. <10.1038/nature09941 >.

Tortora, Gerard J., and Bryan Derrickson. Principles of Anatomy and Physiology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Print.