Retina - a brain tissue

In vertebrate embryonic development, the retina and the optic nerve originate as outgrowths of the developing brain, so the retina is considered part of the central nervous system (CNS) and is actually brain tissue.^[1] It is the only part of the CNS that can be visualized non-invasively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v15/n3/full/nn.3032.html

Brain circuits are assembled from a large variety of morphologically and functionally diverse cell types. It is not known how the intermingled cell types of an individual adult brain region differ in their expressed genomes. Here we describe an atlas of cell type transcriptomes in one brain region, the mouse retina. We found that each adult cell type expressed a specific set of genes, including a unique set of transcription factors, forming a 'barcode' for cell identity. Cell type transcriptomes carried enough information to categorize cells into morphological classes and types. Several genes that were specifically expressed in particular retinal circuit elements, such as inhibitory neuron types, are associated with eye diseases. The resource described here allows gene expression to be compared across adult retinal cell types, experimenting with specific transcription factors to differentiate stem or somatic cells to retinal cell types, and predicting cellular targets of newly discovered disease-associated genes.