Image-formation in tissues: inside the eye, in microscopy, and in-silico.

Image formation inside biological tissues is of physiological relevance in the eye and practical importance in the context of tissue and whole organism microscopy. Here I discuss how a tissue that evolved under the strongest optical constraints, the vertebrate retina, deals with incoming light. We show by direct transmission measurements how the unique chromatin arrangement within photoreceptor nuclei impacts image quality at the level of the photorecetors. We complement these measurements by wave optical simulations of forward scattering. Finally, we show how these simulations can also be used to mimic the image formation process in tissue microscopy.