Skip to main content

Write a PREreview

Oxidative Stress Signaling and Regenerative Responses in a Larval Zebrafish Model of Retinal Light Damage

Posted
Server
Preprints.org
DOI
10.20944/preprints202602.0639.v1

The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a widely used model for studying retinal regeneration. In adults, light-induced retinal damage (LIRD) serves as an environmental phototoxic stressor that induces photoreceptor degeneration and regenerative responses, whereas larval models remain comparatively underexplored. In this study, we validate a larval LIRD paradigm as a versatile system for studying acute phototoxic injury and early regeneration-associated transcriptomic responses. Using high-throughput RNA sequencing, we profiled retinal transcriptional changes 48 hours post-LIRD and complemented these findings with targeted pharmacological modulation of redox signaling. Larval LIRD induced robust activation of canonical apoptotic and regeneration-associated pathways, recapitulating key features of adult LIRD models while engaging previously underexplored gene-regulatory networks. Among these, pathways related to oxidative stress responses, antioxidant enzymes, and oxygen metabolism were prominently regulated. Functional attenuation of oxidative stress using N-acetylcysteine reduced phototoxic injury-induced apoptosis and proliferation, while inflammatory markers remained largely unaffected. Conversely, subtoxic intra-retinal hydrogen peroxide exposure was sufficient to induce proliferative markers without eliciting apoptosis response. At the signaling level, modulation of oxidative stress influenced components of growth-associated signaling pathways activated during early injury response. Together, these findings support a role for oxidative stress as a key component of early injury-associated signaling in larval retinal regeneration. This study validates larval LIRD as a versatile experimental model and provides a transcriptomic resource for investigating redox-associated mechanisms underlying retinal injury and repair.

You can write a PREreview of Oxidative Stress Signaling and Regenerative Responses in a Larval Zebrafish Model of Retinal Light Damage. A PREreview is a review of a preprint and can vary from a few sentences to a lengthy report, similar to a journal-organized peer-review report.

Before you start

We will ask you to log in with your ORCID iD. If you don’t have an iD, you can create one.

What is an ORCID iD?

An ORCID iD is a unique identifier that distinguishes you from everyone with the same or similar name.

Start now