2014-11-17

Recent research findings on the subject are presented in a paper.

Normal vision and accommodation rely on the clarity and softness of the eye lens. Hardening of the lens has been linked with presbyopia, the loss of accommodative capability with age. In a publication that has just appeared in PNAS, researchers from the Division of Physical Chemistry together with colleagues from Université Paris-Sud, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, the University of Fribourg and Rochester Institute of Technology now demonstrate that concentrated solutions of a prevalent eye lens structural protein, α-crystallin, indeed exhibit high-concentration dynamical slowing down similar to that of hard-sphere glass transitions. This suggests that analogous investigation of concentrated crystallin mixtures, like those in the living lens, may help to advance understanding of the molecular basis of presbyopia.

Ref: “Hard sphere-like glass transition in eye lens α-crystallin solutions”, G. Foffi, G. Savin, S. Bucciarelli, N. Dorsaz, G. M. Thurston, A. Stradner, and P. Schurtenberger, PNAS (2014) doi/10.1073/pnas.1406990111