Armed with a new ability to find retinal anomalies at the cellular level, Mahmut Karakaya in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, along with colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and neurobiologists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have made a discovery they hope will ultimately lead to a treatment for cancer of the retina.
The scientists used ORNL’s specialized tracing algorithm allows researchers to analyze thousands of cells instead of just a few dozen. This tool has helped reveal a previously undiscovered role of Rb, the retinoblastoma tumor suppressor gene in the developing retina.
Find out more about their discovery here.