A recently published article by Emory Department of Ophthalmology researcher Linjiang Lou, PhD, seeks to capture the career aspirations of next-generation scientists.
“Creating a Clear Image of Myopia: Discovering the Cause and Developing Treatments” uses laymen’s language to introduce young readers to myopia, an area of ophthalmology that has thoroughly ensnared Lou, a researcher in Machelle T. Pardue’s lab.
“For me, it was a learning experience – describing our work and how we do it,” said Lou, who received a 2023 ARVO Science Communications Training Fellowship to support her writing.
“As scientists, we often write papers in a niche field that are only understood by other scientists. But if we want to continue to receive support for our work, we need to be able to advocate for it, to explain it to a wider audience.”
That wider audience includes teenagers, the researchers of tomorrow. Lou’s article was published by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine that promotes STEM careers to teens.
Understanding the lab's mission
A glossary of ophthalmic terms (“emmetropisation,” “axial length”, “refractive error”) allows young readers to dive into Lou’s article with confidence. The basic science of myopia will not be lost in jargon, even if some of the questions that Lou and her research colleagues are tackling in the lab remain a challenge.
An example? How Lou handles the very complicated condition that is the target of her piece:
“How does myopia occur? After birth, the optical power (i.e., focusing strength) and size of our eyes come into balance to achieve clear vision, a developmental process known as emmetropisation. However, if the eye’s optical power and axial length fail to come into balance, then light does not focus correctly on the retina, the light-sensitive tissue in the back of the eye. This leads to refractive errors, which result in blurry vision. The two main types of refractive error are myopia (near-sightedness), which typically occurs when the eye is too long, and hyperopia (far-sightedness), which typically occurs when the eye is too short.”
The article also introduces readers to the team of researchers who are working with Lou and Pardue to find new interventions for myopia: Reece Mazade, PhD, Melissa Bentley-Ford, PhD, and Teele Palumaa, PhD. Though their goal is complex, Lou manages to keep their mission understandable:
"What is the team investigating? Visual signals from the environment are processed within the eye to control eye growth and guide emmetropisation. These visual signals are detected and processed by the retina, initiating a chain of events that are then detected by the sclera, the white outermost layer of the eye, to drive changes in eye size. [Dr. Pardue’s] lab is studying the retinal pathways and the roles of two signalling molecules, retinal dopamine and retinoic acid, in the regulation of eye growth and myopia development."
Together, the lab team is using a mouse model devised by Pardue to better understand the scleral and retinal pathways of myopia development. Pardue's research has already found that, with experimental myopia, retinoic acid levels increase. She has also found increasing retinoic acid levels can cause myopia in animal models.
By contrast, she notes "Retinal dopamine levels are reduced in most animal models of myopia, and we have shown that increasing retinal dopamine levels can prevent experimental myopia in animals.”
All members of the lab are involved in the process.
"An advantage of the mouse model is that we can manipulate both the genetics and environment,” Palumaa explains. “We can study the impact of a specific gene on myopia development by inactivating or removing it from the genome of the mouse.”
The team is using custom instruments to measure the refractive error and axial length of the mice.
"This allows us to examine how normal eye growth of the response or experimental myopia is affected with different genetic or environmental manipulations," says Lou. “We also measure whether retinal dopamine levels are altered by these experimental conditions.”
Previous research conducted by Mazade has identified rod photoreceptors -- a part of the eye that is responsible for for visionin dim conditions -- as critical to refractive development.
The lab has also found that the stiffness of the sclera is decreased in cases of experimental myopia and with retinoic acid treatment. “Ultimately, changes in eye size are due to remodelling of the sclera,” says Bentley-Ford. “I use high-resolution microscopes to visualise cells in the sclera and examine how they are affected during experimental myopia. This will allow us to better understand the role of these cells in myopia.”
Writing a more effective treatment for myopia is the goal
For Lou, the scientist, the challenge of simplifying her language for the Futurum audience has done nothing to simplify her ultimate goal: conquering the threat of myopia, an eye condition that affects more than 30 percent of the world population. There’s still plenty of research that needs to be done.
She is also grateful for the opportunity to translate the basics of her research for a mainstream audience, knowing that some day she may want to teach at a college level.
But just days after the Futurum piece was published, she gave a talk before her colleagues in the Atlanta Vision Research Community that left no question about the complexity of the problems she continues to tackle:
“Optimizing Methods for Measuring Axial Length in a Mouse Model of Myopia”
(There was no glossary in her abstract, but you can bet Linjiang Lou, PhD remained at the podium, afterwards, eager to answer questions from her peers.)
-Kathleen E. Moore