Biologist Joseph O’Tousa and his graduate students are working to find answers to blindness, including age-related conditions such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.

They are unlocking the secrets of vision of the humble fruit fly, which serves as a very good model for the human visual system. It is expected that in the year 2020, about 5.5 million Americans over the age of 40 will be affected by declining vision. A mutation in a protein, called rhodopsin, is an inherited trait that is primarily responsible for deterioration of vision. O’Tousa's laboratory is using the information from the sequencing of the Drosophila genome to define the cellular role of the genes that causes deterioration of the eye.