A Revised View on Growth and Remodeling in the Retinal Vasculature

The mouse retina provides an excellent model for studying angiogenesis. Recent advancements in high-throughput microscopy and image analysis provide great tools to visualize and describe the complexity of the retinal vascular architecture in a detailed and comprehensive way. Most developmental studies have focused on only a few parameters mostly in the inner-most layers that do not describe the entirety of the three-dimensional vascular network. Here, we analyzed the entire three-dimensional retinal vascular architecture and its growth and remodeling starting from the age of postnatal day 3 to 4 months in mice. We show plexus specific characteristics of the vasculature in terms of vascular tissue fraction, branching and length of the blood vessels, and distance and distribution between single capillaries. Such detailed knowledge is of particular interest, as it has become apparent that disease-specific mechanisms and treatments affect the retinal vasculature often in a plexus specific way.