Lens Development: Bringing signaling complexity into focus
Date
2025-04-01
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eLife
Abstract
Ask yourself, what is necessary for you to read this article? And how are you able to discern between individual words or letters? Evolution has solved these challenges by developing a complex organ, the eye, that is similar in many ways to a camera. It has a lens that focuses light onto a light-sensitive tissue, the retina, which captures this information and relays it to the brain. For the lens to be effective, it needs to be transparent, and complex genetic pathways have emerged to ensure that this happens during development. In vertebrates, the majority of the cells in the lens are fiber cells.
Although the need for cross-talk between the lens and the retina during lens development was first noticed in 1901 (Spemann, 1901), the details of the impact of this cross-talk on the differentiation of lens cells did not become clear until the early 1960s. Reversing the orientation of a chick embryonic lens so that its anterior region faced the retina (rather than looking outwards) led to a dramatic cellular reorganization: the lens epithelium facing the retina differentiated into fiber cells, suggesting that a key signal from the retina drives this differentiation of lens cells (Coulombre and Coulombre, 1963). This signal was later revealed to be a protein called fibroblast growth factor (or FGF for short; Chamberlain and McAvoy, 1987), which, depending on its dosage, can induce epithelial cell proliferation or their differentiation into fiber cells in the lens (McAvoy and Chamberlain, 1989).
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This article was originally published in eLife. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.106519.
© 2025, Coomson and Lachke.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Coomson, Sarah Y, and Salil A Lachke. “Lens Development: Bringing Signaling Complexity into Focus.” eLife 14 (April 2025): e106519. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.106519.