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Zuzanna Dzieniak (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology)09/06/2026, 09:30Disease MechanismsTalk
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of irreversible blindness in people of working age. It is characterised by retinal vascular degeneration due to chronically elevated blood glucose levels. As the disease progresses, ischemia causes abnormal neovascularisation leading to retinal detachments, haemorrhage and vision loss.
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We characterised pathological retinal vessel... -
Yi Jiang09/06/2026, 09:45Disease MechanismsTalk
Ciliopathies are a group of disorders associated with pathogenic variants in genes that result in abnormal formation or dysfunction of cilia. Retinal degeneration is a common feature in ciliopathies. Pathogenic variants in Intraflagellar transport 140 (IFT140) are associated to syndromic and non-syndromic ciliopathies. Yet, the different effects of IFT140 variants in different tissues,...
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Enny van Beest (UCL - Institute of Ophthalmology)09/06/2026, 11:252Visual NeuroscienceTalk
Navigation is a complex goal-directed behaviour that requires the integration of sensation, reward, motion, and internal spatial representations to understand one’s position in the environment. Forms of spatial representations were identified in many brain regions beyond the hippocampal formation. However, these findings arose from a variety of experimental conditions, often not suited to...
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Aleksandra Krzywanska (University College London, Institute of Ophthalmology)09/06/2026, 11:40Ocular Development and AgeingTalk
The retina, a light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye, undergoes neurodegeneration and vision loss with age. Progress in understanding these processes, and in developing treatments for age-related retinal diseases, has been limited by the difficulty of studying aged human tissue and the constraints of traditional animal models. The African turquoise killifish, with its short lifespan of...
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Farah Olivia Rezek (UCL)09/06/2026, 11:55Genomic and Translational MedicineTalk
Doyne honeycomb retinal dystrophy is an incurable juvenile macular dystrophy that leads to visual impairment by early to mid-adulthood. It is an autosomal dominant disorder caused by a c.1033C>T, p.Arg(345Trp) variant in EFEMP1, and is characterised by the early onset extracellular deposition of drusen between the retinal pigment epithelium basement membrane and underlying layers of Bruch’s...
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Nihar Bhattacharyya (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology)09/06/2026, 14:30Genomic and Translational MedicineTalk
Posterior polymorphous corneal dystrophy (PPCD) is a rare inherited corneal endothelial dystrophy caused by pathogenic variants in the transcription factor encoding genes OVOL2, GRHL2, and ZEB1, key regulators of epithelial-mesenchymal/mesenchymal-epithelial transition (EMT/MET) and cellular differentiation. In PPCD, reduced ZEB1 expression or ectopic expression of OVOL2 or GRHL2...
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Georgia Milne09/06/2026, 14:451Visual NeuroscienceTalk
Top-down signalling across the visual hierarchy is thought to support invariant perception, enabling object recognition despite changes in viewpoint, noise, and ambiguity. A central unresolved question is whether high-level prior knowledge shapes neural representations throughout the visual hierarchy, including early visual cortex, or whether its influence is largely confined to higher-order...
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Alex He09/06/2026, 15:00Disease MechanismsTalk
Epithelial polarity is essential for retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) function, yet how polarity signalling regulates membrane trafficking remains poorly understood. We previously identified the apical polarity determinant Dbl3, a Cdc42-specific GEF, and its effector kinase MRCKβ as key regulators of apical actomyosin contractility. Here, we investigate whether this signalling axis coordinates...
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