Regarding attempts to establish useful retinal landmarks,
the fundus lens is especially effective in visualizing retinal
vasculature and blood flow. This ability has significant potential
to enable longitudinal study of retinopathy and macular
degeneration, including recent hypoxia-induced models
of angiogenesis [25] using this same transgenic line. The
capacity to robustly visualize vasculature and blood flow in
repeated measures could also be informative in defining the
time course of angiogenesis associated with tumorigenesis.
This could in some instances be facilitated by delivery of
fluorescently labeled lectin peanut agglutinin, because it was
able to selectively label some cell types, including vasculature.
The delivery of other dyes, such as recently described
coumarin dyes [33], might allow additional cell types to be
resolved, whereas deploying GFP reporters of transcriptional
activity could permit a unique combination of spatial and
temporal information. Finally, this technology should be
amenable to other species, including but not limited to mouse
and Xenopus, with accessible transgenesis technology.