Human photoreceptor cells from different macular subregions have distinct transcriptional profiles [bulk RNA-seq]

Purpose: The goals of this study were to identify cell specific expression patterns from the fovea, perifovea, and macular neural retina. Methods: Independent libraries were prepared for human foveal (1mm), perifoveal (4mm), and macular (8mm) regions of neural retina. Poly-A selected RNA transcripts underwent 150 base-pair paired-end sequencing with an Illumina HiSeq 4000. Reads were mapped to the human genome hg19 with STAR (version = 020201) and quantified with the featureCounts function from the Rsubread package (version = 1.28.1). Differential expression analysis was performed with edgeR (version = 3.26.8). Results: Differential expression analysis identified genes enriched in each retinal region. Conclusions: This study provides a transcriptomic comparison of foveal, perifoveal, and macular human neural retina at the bulk and single-cell levels. mRNA profiles from human neural retina isolates were generated from four donor eyes followed by sequencing on a HiSeq 4000.