NEIBank: Est Analysis And Bioinformatics For Ocular Genomics

National Eye Institute

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Abstract

Many human eye (and also ear) tissues and those of important animal models have now been analyzed. In addition NEIBank collaborations have added data on other sensory tissues, ear and taste bud. Recent eye additions include human optic nerve and human pterygium. This DNA resource has been used to create cDNA microarrays with 13,000 non-redundant human eye expressed sequences and 6500 sequences from mouse eye. These are being used in analysis of human cellular responses and genetically modified mouse models. A powerful addition to the informatics tools for eye research is EyeBrowse, a dedicated genome browser for eye-expressed genes, produced in collaboration with CIT. http://eyebrowse.cit.nih.gov/genome/. Major additions are a unique annotated database of human eye disease genes and databases of candidate eye disease regions of the genome. These are displayed in EyeBrowse along with all known human eye-derived cDNAs and SAGE data, indicating expression profiles specific to eye. NEIBank analyses give insights into normal tissues expression patterns and provide insight into disease processes. Recently completed work on human pterygium has identified tissue-specific cell type profiles and a number of highly expressed genes related to cell migration. This in turn has led to cell culture experiments showing that specific inhibitors may be able to block migration of pterygium-derived cells. Work in press describes the EST profile for authentic human optic nerve and corrects misidentified information in the public databases. NEIBank analyses provide detailed insights into the expression of genes in eye tissues of several important animal models. Most recently this includes data on the guinea pig, which in many ways is a better model for human eye that the more commonly used mouse.