Manookin Lab furthering the understanding of the retina

Finding a way to restore vision lost to eye disease is the overarching goal of Associate Professor Mike Manookin’s research at the Vision Science Center at South Lake Union.

“The goal is to understand the retina well enough to restore vision in disease states,” says Manookin. “We currently don’t have a deep enough understanding of the retina to restore function following blinding disease.”

To do that, we need to know the retina's circuitry, Manookin explained.

“There's been progress made in some animal models, but less so in humans in learning what information different retinal circuits are encoding and how disease affects them,” he says.

The Manookin laboratory investigates the function and connectivity of neural circuits in the retina using techniques including electrophysiology, calcium imaging, and electron microscopy.

Working in collaboration with Research Associate Professor Ethan Buhr, PhD, and Adjunct Professor Fred Rieke, PhD, Manookin is recording the electrical activity of light sensitivity in neurons of the retina to help learn how we can stimulate light sensitivity. His research is partly supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Manookin says there are over 80 different neuronal types in the human retina. These form the components of the specialized circuits that transform the signals from photoreceptors into a neural code responsible for our perception of color, form, motion, and, thus, visual experience. 

Many blinding diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa, cause death of the rods and cones but spare other cell types within the retina. Thus, many techniques for restoring visual function following blindness are based on the premise that other cells within the retina remain viable and capable of performing their various roles in visual processing.  However, the circuitry of the remaining retina does seem to change following the loss of photoreceptors.  Understanding the native and non-native circuitry will be critical to emerging techniques for vision restoration, including gene therapy, cell-based therapies, and small molecule photoswitches.

Raised in a farming area of central Utah, Mike completed a mission for his church in Estonia. He studied linguistics as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University before becoming interested in neuroscience. At the University of Michigan, studying for his PhD, he “really got hooked on vision,” studying visual coding in the retina and physiology of the retina.

He came to UW as a post-doctoral scholar before joining the faculty of the Department of Ophthalmology in 2015. Mike and his wife Karen, a former faculty member in the School of Dentistry, have four children. In his free time, he enjoys cooking and reading.