Subterranean Fishes of the World

6073

2023

Development

1-14

150, dev200399

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium

The vertebrate eye is shaped as a cup, a conformation that optimizes vision and is acquired early in development through a process known as optic cup morphogenesis. Imaging living, transparent teleost embryos and mammalian stem cell-derived organoids has provided insights into the rearrangements that eye progenitors undergo to adopt such a shape. Molecular and pharmacological interference with these rearrangements has further identified the underlying molecular machineries and the physical forces involved in this morphogenetic process. In this Review, we summarize the resulting scenarios and proposed models that include common and species-specific events. We further discuss how these studies and those in environmentally adapted blind species may shed light on human inborn eye malformations that result from failures in optic cup morphogenesis, including microphthalmia, anophthalmia and coloboma. KEY WORDS: Neural retina, Retina pigment epithelium, Organoids, Zebrafish, Human, Mammals, Anophthalmia, Microphthalmia, Gene regulatory networks, Cavefish

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