Damage or infection to the adult cornea results in scarring and loss of transparency. Since fetal tissue has been known to regenerate without scarring, we wanted to study corneal wound regeneration in an embryonic chick cornea. The avian cornea and human cornea have very different corneal collagen structures, so we also wanted to compare and identify the differences in these collagen structures. Our lab has developed a second harmonic generation optical imaging paradigm called Non-Linear Optical High Resolution Macroscopy (NLO-HRMac). This imaging technique has the ability to image large cross-sectional volumes of corneal collagen at sub micron resolution in three dimensions.

Chick embryo corneas were wounded at embryonic day (E) 7 by creating a linear incision traversing the epithelium and anterior stroma. The eyes were collected at E16, 9 days post wound (dps). Using HRMac, we were able to image a control embryonic chick cornea at E16 to determine if the cornea regenerated scar-free.