Vision is energy-intensive. Mutations that impair a person's ability to generate energy disproportionately affect vision. Common diseases that cause blindness may also be related to a failure of the eye to generate sufficient energy to serve its needs. Our goal is to understand the metabolic function of individual cells in visual tissues, primarily the retina and retinal pigment epithelium. We want to know which cells in the eye carry out particular metabolic processes (glycogen synthesis, nucleotide synthesis, etc.), what causes a cell to be metabolically 'wired' as it is, the extent to which retina generates metabolic intermediates de novo vs. from circulating, and the extent to which neurodegenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma are linked to metabolic impairments.