ArticleeLife2019
Retinal oxygen supply shaped the functional evolution of the vertebrate eye.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Illuminating how the bird inner retina works without oxygen solves a 350-year-old structural mystery.Nature · 2026Article
- Article
- Hemoglobin-Gene Cluster Deletions in Antarctic White-Blooded Icefishes Facilitated by Transposable Elements.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Visual opsin gene expression evolution in the adaptive radiation of cichlid fishes of Lake Tanganyika.Science advances · 2023Article
- The Opto-Respiratory Compromise: Balancing Oxygen Supply and Light Transmittance in the Retina.Physiology (Bethesda, Md.) · 2022Review
- Advancing human disease research with fish evolutionary mutant models.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2022Review
- Quantitative Approaches to Study Retinal Neurogenesis.Biomedicines · 2021Review
- Ocular ultrasonography of sea turtles.Acta veterinaria Scandinavica · 2020Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
17 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The retina has a very high energy demand but lacks an internal blood supply in most vertebrates. Here we explore the hypothesis that oxygen diffusion limited the evolution of retinal morphology by reconstructing the evolution of retinal thickness and the various mechanisms for retinal oxygen supply, including capillarization and acid-induced haemoglobin oxygen unloading. We show that a common ancestor of bony fishes likely had a thin retina without additional retinal oxygen supply mechanisms and that three different types of retinal capillaries were gained and lost independently multiple times during the radiation of vertebrates, and that these were invariably associated with parallel changes in retinal thickness. Since retinal thickness confers multiple advantages to vision, we propose that insufficient retinal oxygen supply constrained the functional evolution of the eye in early vertebrates, and that recurrent origins of additional retinal oxygen supply mechanisms facilitated the phenotypic evolution of improved functional eye morphology.
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Registered trials
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