Resilience to diabetic retinopathy.

Chronic elevation of blood glucose at first causes relatively minor changes to the neural and vascular components of the retina. As the duration of hyperglycemia persists, the nature and extent of damage increases and becomes readily detectable. While this second, overt manifestation of diabetic retinopathy (DR) has been studied extensively, what prevents maximal damage from the very start of hyperglycemia remains largely unexplored. Recent studies indicate that diabetes (DM) engages mitochondria-based defense during the retinopathy-resistant phase, and thereby enables the retina to remain healthy in the face of hyperglycemia. Such resilience is transient, and its deterioration results in progressive accumulation of retinal damage. The concepts that co-emerge with these discoveries set the stage for novel intellectual and therapeutic opportunities within the DR field. Identification of biomarkers and mediators of protection from DM-mediated damage will enable development of resilience-based therapies that will indefinitely delay the onset of DR.

Surface atomic arrangement visualization via reference-atom-specific holography.

We demonstrate the direct reconstruction of 3D atomic images from measured low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) intensity spectra. A multiple-incident angle and multiple-energy integral are first applied to the spectra to obtain a map of interatomic vectors. From this map, a nonbulk interatomic vector is chosen that points to a desired reference atom. A second integral transformation, using the chosen interatomic vector as a filter, is applied to the LEED spectra to produce images of individual atoms in the vicinity of the selected reference atom. This two-step method overcomes the problem of multiple, nonequivalent reference atoms and is applicable to elemental or compound materials.