Figure 1. The inner and outer retina of diabetic mice take up less manganese than in controls – a pattern partially corrected in the outer retina upon treatment with 11-cis-retinal. A: Representative pseudo-color spin-lattice relaxation rate (1/T1) parameter maps of control (left), diabetic (middle), and diabetic treated with 11-cis-retinal (right) mice illustrate lower uptake in diabetics, and partial correction with 11-cis-retinal treatment. Note that 1/T1 values directly reflect manganese levels [16] and greater manganese uptake is indicated by brighter retinal reds. The central retinal regions analyzed in this study are indicated by the white boxes and the extraocular muscle region-of-interest analyzed herein is illustrated in the right-most image. B: Quantitative analysis of manganese uptake in inner (left graph) and outer retina (right graph) confirms the pattern suggested by the representative images above. * indicates a significant difference (p<0.05) from control mice values; # indicates a significant difference (p<0.05) from the diabetic mice values. The error bars represent standard deviations, and numbers above the bars represent the number of animals studied.