Dr. Mason Posner, professor of Biology, was interviewed on campus by Mansfield's WMFD-TV and was featured in a news segment that described how Posner and a team of undergraduate students have been working for the past three years to uncover what Zebrafish can tell us about cataracts, which are the greatest source of human blindess worldwide.
The TV news segment can be viewed at --
https://www.wmfd.com/
Posner and his undergraduate students have asked how a type of zebrafish, used for years to study the cardiovascular system, develops eye lens cataracts, a disease that continues to be the greatest source of human blindness worldwide. While previous work suggested that these zebrafish produced less of one crucial lens protein, triggering cloudiness in their lenses, Dr. Mason Posner and his students used two techniques that measure levels of gene expression to suggest that this might not be the case. “Instead, it seems the abnormal lenses in these fish are caused by a more general stress resulting from the lack of another gene that controls the production of blood cells,” Posner said.
