Comparative gene expression study and pathway analysis of the human iris- and the retinal pigment epithelium.

Degeneration of the RPE leads to severe vision loss in, so far incurable, diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and some forms of retinitis pigmentosa. A promising future replacement therapy may be autologous iris epithelial cell transdifferentiation into RPE in vitro and, subsequently, transplantation. In this study we compared the gene expression profiles of the iris epithelium (IE) and the RPE.We compared the gene expression profiles of RPE and IE. We collected 5 IE and RPE samples from 5 different donors. Next, we performed RNA isolation, amplification, labeling and hybridization against 44k Agilent microarrays, using a common reference design.