A SINGLE-CELL RNA-SEQ ANALYSIS UNRAVELS THE HETEROGENEITY OF PRIMARY CULTURED HUMAN CORNEAL ENDOTHELIAL CELLS
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: The corneas is a transparent and avascular tissue located in front of the eye. Its inner surface is lined by a monolayer of corneal endothelial cells (CECs), which maintain the cornea transparent. CECs remain arrested at a non-proliferative state and damage to these cells can compromise their function leading to corneal opacity. The primary culture of donor-derived CECs is a promising cell therapy. It confers the potential to treat multiple patients from a single donor, alleviating the global donor shortage. Nevertheless, this approach has limitations preventing its adoption, particularly culture protocols allow limited expansion of CECs and there is a lack of clear parameters to identify therapy-grade CECs. To address this limitation, a better understanding of the molecular changes arising from the primary culture of CECs is required. Using single-cell RNA sequencing on primary cultured CECs, we identify their variable transcriptomic fingerprint at the single cell level, provide a pseudo temporal reconstruction of the changes arising from primary culture, and suggest markers to assess the quality of primary CEC cultures. This research depicts a deep transcriptomic understanding of the cellular heterogeneity arising from the primary expansion of CECs and sets the basis for further improvement of culture protocols and therapies.
ORGANISM(S): Homo sapiens
PROVIDER: GSE227942 | GEO | 2023/06/06
REPOSITORIES: GEO
ACCESS DATA