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

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. 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.

人类眼球的睫状体（ciliary body, CB）由无色素神经上皮（non-pigmented neuro-epithelia, NPE）与色素神经上皮（pigmented neuro-epithelia, PE）组成。为阐明睫状体核心生理功能背后的分子机制，本研究针对NPE与PE的基因表达展开分析。我们通过激光显微切割术（laser dissection microscopy），从7例健康人类供体眼球中分离得到NPE与PE细胞；随后依次完成RNA提取（RNA isolation）、扩增（amplification）、标记（labeling），并将处理后的样本与44k安捷伦微阵列（44k Agilent microarrays）进行杂交，实验以人视网膜色素上皮/脉络膜RNA（human RPE/choroid RNA）作为通用参考样本。本研究中，我们为来自7名不同供体的PE样本设置7组重复实验，为同7名供体的NPE样本同样设置7组重复实验。