Many patients diagnosed with retinal diseases suffer from severe visual impairment or even legal blindness. These retinal diseases include retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration. To date, no definitive cure or treatment is available to restore the vision with blindness or reverse the process of degeneration. Somatic cells are programmed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and then they progress into three-dimensional (3D) retinal organoids (ROs) technology. These organoids help in a better understanding and even treatment of retinal diseases. Many studies currently exist to generate ROs from PSCs. Still, they mostly follow different differentiation strategies and various analysis methods to confirm eye and retinal cells' efficient and proper generation. In addition, most of these protocols lack the presence of retinal pigment epithelium layer (RPE) and show low light-sensitive photoreceptors.

This methods collection aims to combine current methods and strategies to improve the generation and characterization of ROs. In particular, the protocols that show the presence of various aspects of the human eye retina (proper retinal layers, neural and non-neural cell types, presence, or co-culture of RPE cells...); and the methodological experiments aiming to characterize the cell population generated, e.g., the presence of light-sensitive photoreceptors.