With an incredible diversity of cell types, the central nervous system (CNS), comprising the brain, spinal cord and retina, can be considered to be the most complex organ in the body.
Professor Bill Harris, an experimental biologist and Head of the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, is fascinated by how this complex and sophisticated system is built out of a collection of undifferentiated cells. By putting an advanced technology to novel use, he has been able to observe for the first time the entire process of retinal development at the cellular level in zebrafish embryos. This has achieved a long-sought goal in developmental neurobiology: a complete analysis of the building of a vertebrate CNS structure in vivo.
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Image: Zebrafish. Credit: Bill Harris
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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