Protects light-sensing cells
Photoreceptor Survival
In depth
The hungriest cells you own. They tear down and rebuild their own working surface every single day, because catching light consumes them that fast, and they do not come back.
What drives it
Oxidative stress reduces it.
In rd1 mice, markers of oxidative damage (protein carbonyl adducts, acrolein staining) rose in the retina as photoreceptors degenerated, and an antioxidant combination roughly doubled surviving cone density and partly preserved cone electroretinogram function, showing that oxidative stress drives photoreceptor death. doi 10.1073/pnas.0604056103 · PMID 16849425
Blends that modulate it
Each blend page names this pathway and carries the study behind its claim.
See it on the map
Open the causal map to follow this pathway upstream and downstream, arrow by arrow, each with its study.