Institution: University of California San Francisco
Poster Title: The Role of FLVCR2 in Retinal Angiogenesis
Abstract: Genetic mutations in humans cause improper vascularization of the retina and lead to severe visual impairments manifested in diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and familial exudative vitreoretinopathy. Feline leukemia virus subgroup C receptor (FLVCR2), also known as MFSD7c, is a member of the major facilitator superfamily (MFS) of membrane transporters. FLVCR2 is a blood brain barrier choline transporter that controls vascularization of the brain. Like the brain, the retina is primarily vascularized through sprouting angiogenesis, raising the hypothesis that FLVCR2 also controls retinal angiogenic growth. Based on mRNA expression and a new FLVCR2-HA (hemagglutinin) reporter in mice, we show that FLVCR2 expression correlates with that of other angiogenesis-related genes. We then performed endothelial-cell specific conditional deletion of FLVCR2 in mice (Cdh5CreER;FLVCR2flox) and demonstrate that FLVCR2 plays a key role in retinal angiogenesis, highlighting the key feature of decreased angiogenic sprouting upon knockout of the gene. Together, our report defines a novel role for FLVCR2 the eye. Our future work will focus on the exact role of FLVCR2, and its transport substrate choline, in developmental angiogenesis and related diseases of the eye.