The classical radioautography method of measuring renewal takes a long time (months of exposure) and is tedious. As a consequence, experiments using this method have been used rarely in recent years. Thus, little is known about the molecular mechanisms controlling outer segment renewal

To identify molecular mechanisms of rod outer segment renewal, we developed a transgenic zebrafish, Tg(hsp70:HA-mCherry^TM), that allows us to rapidly measure the kinetics of rod outer segment renewal (Willoughby and Jensen, 2012) using confocal fluorescence microscopy.