Gene expression of the pigmented and non-pigmented epithelia of the ciliary body of human healthy eyes. Homo sapiens

The ciliary body (CB) of the human eye consists of the non-pigmented (NPE) and pigmented (PE) neuro-epithelia. We investigated the gene expression of the NPE and PE, to shed light on the molecular mechanisms underlying the most important functions of the CB. Therefore we isolated NPE and PE cells from seven healthy human donor eyes using laser dissection microscopy. Next, we performed RNA isolation, amplification, labeling and hybridization against 44k Agilent microarrays. Overall design: We performed the microarrays against a common reference sample, namely human RPE/choroid RNA. We performed 7 replicates of PE samples from 7 different donors and 7 NPE replicates from the same 7 different donors.