In collaboration with researchers at A*Star (Singapore), the team has reported a detailed Eye Gene Atlas for human, porcine and zebrafish. This provided an important tools to understand the inter-species differences in genetic signals in the eye and a disease map for genes involved in eye disorders.
Multi-species single-cell transcriptomic analysis of ocular compartment regulons
Pradeep Gautam, Kiyofumi Hamashima, Ying Chen, Ying Ying Zeng, Bar
Makovoz, Bhav Harshad Parikh, Hsin Yee Lee, Katherine Anne Lau, Xinyi Su,
Raymond Ching-Bong Wong, Khiong Woon Chan, Hu Li, Timothy A Blenkinsop,
Yuin Han Loh
Nature Communications, 2021 Sep 28;12(1):5675
Abstract
We constructed the first single cell atlas of the human, porcine and zebrafish ocular
compartments and compared inter-species transcriptomic expression data in retinal cell
populations. In the non-retinal cell populations, we identified putative adult stem cells present in the iris tissue. We created a disease map of genes involved in eye disorders across cells of posterior and anterior compartments of eye. We also probed the regulons of different cell populations, which included transcription factors (TFs) and receptor-ligand interactions and reveal unique directional signalling and cross-talks between ocular cell-types. Such regulons were checked for conservation across vertebrates including human, mouse, pig, zebrafish, and non-human primates to identify common core factors. Finally, we focused on one such transcription factor KLF7, which was conserved across species. After perturbing KLF7 gene expression during retinal ganglion cells (RGC) differentiation from human embryonic stem cells, we conclude that KLF7 plays a major role in maturation of RGC cells during differentiation.
Read the publication here.