DOYNE REVISITED

Inherited retinal dystrophies are important causes of blindness in the Western world, Molecular genetic techniques, and the use of large ped igrees exhibiting such conditions, have been instrumental in finding c ausative disease genes. The genealogy of families with a rare conditio n known as Doyne's honeycomb retinal degeneration was first described in 1899. Investigating this phenotype is extremely important because o f the similarities it shares with age-related macular degeneration, an d it may lead us to a gene that is involved in this complex genetic tr ait. In this paper we review the original genealogy of the families de scribed by Doyne, and explain the methods used to identify the living descendants of these families.