Quantifying and Characterizing Angiogenesis Using the Postnatal Mouse Retina

Angiogenesis refers to the expansion of blood vessels from a preexisting vascular plexus, and it is a fundamental process for organ development, the female reproductive system, and wound healing, but it is also a common denominator in several diseases such as cancer and neovascular eye disease. For these reasons, shedding light on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of angiogenesis has the potential to devise new therapeutic strategies to refrain pathological vessel growth or even promote new vessel formation in ischemic conditions and organ grafts. The mouse postnatal retina provides an excellent and widely adopted model to study physiological angiogenesis in vivo, and this chapter outlines a detailed protocol for its dissection, staining, and analysis of the vasculature.