UC San Diego

The cornea is consisted with continuous and smooth epithelial cells in the center and limbal stem cells in the edge. Their transparency plays important role in maintaining our vision. Any deficiency in cornea epithelial cells (CECs) or limbal stem cells (LSCs) will lead to transparency lost and blindness. In our study, we successfully developed a protocol for cell culture to expand LSCs from human donors and animal tissues. Enabling us to generate a homogenous cell population to study key factors involved in LSCs fate determination and CEC differentiation. Through the genome-wide gene expression analysis, we found WNT7A and PAX6 were highly involved in LSCs and CECs, which gave us a insight of these two genes regulation for limbal stem cell fate determination.