A method for measuring the oxygen consumption of photoreceptor cells in the steady state and after a brief stimulation by light.

The rate of oxygen consumption (QO2) in living tissue cannot be directly measured but may be estimated by mathematically modelling the diffusion of oxygen in the tissue and measuring the local partial pressure of oxygen (PO2). The retina of arthropods contains only two types of cells, photoreceptor and glial cells, which are regularly distributed. Because of this simple structure, simple models of diffusion can be used to estimate the QO2 of the tissue, both in steady state and after a brief stimulation by light. We used a model of diffusion in a plane sheet to calculate the QO2 in a slice of honeybee drone retina, which contains a few thousand cells. We then modified the method slightly and used a model with spherical symmetry to calculate the QO2 in the cluster of three photoreceptor cells of the barnacle and in the single ventral photoreceptor cells of Limulus.