| HRA000781
(Controlled Access)
|
Corneal endothelium (CE) maintains corneal hydration and clarity. In human, corneal endothelial cell density decreases throughout life, but exhibits limited regenerative capacity. Therefore, progressive endothelial cell loss, such as in Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy (FECD), may lead to corneal edema and vision loss. CE was considered as a homogenous population because of the overall hexagonal morphology. However, here we identified 4 transcriptomically distinct subtypes through single-cell RNA sequencing and unsupervised clustering analysis from healthy donor corneas. Moreover, we revealed that the long non-coding RNA NEAT1 was predominately expressed in C0 cluster and down-regulated in FECD human samples. |
