Chennai, March 21 -- Highlights:

* Scientists have developed a safe gene therapy alternative for retinal blindness.

* In people with retinal blindness, medium-wavelength cone opsin (MW-opsin) is not //expressed as the rod and cone photoreceptor cells are destroyed

* To reverse this, scientists used an adeno-associated virus to target retinal ganglion cells and loaded it with the gene for a green opsin

* After being injected into the eye, the virus carried the gene into the ganglion cells which had become insensitive to light can now once again become light sensitive again thereby restoring sight

A safe gene therapy alternative for retinal blindness has been developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gene Ther...