Maintenance of optical quality during crystalline lens growth

Vertebrate lenses grow throughout life by the division of cells at the lens surface. The fibre cells thus produced are gradually covered by newer tissue, giving a layered structure. During growth, the lens must remain transparent and retain its refractile properties. The severity of these constraints is perhaps most evident in teleost fish which have a spherical lens that may increase in volume by a thousandfold during the first year of life. The dioptric power of the teleost fish eye is vested entirely in this spherical lens, as water, the cornea and the intraocular vitreous humour have almost identical refractive indices. Spherical lenses of uniform refractive index produce poor images because rays entering at different distances from the optic axis are focused at different distances from the lens. Teleost fish do not suffer from this imperfection and it has long been presumed that this is because there exists a refractive index gradient having a high value in the centre and decreasing continuously and symmetrically with radius in all directions. Here we demonstrate in the African cichlid fish, Haplochromis burtoni, that a refractive index gradient does exist, although its form is significantly different from that previously postulated.