Our Eye Content Pack 1st Edition (ECP1) gives vision scientists content and controls for studying relationships between genes and eye function. By adding the Eye Content Pack to Core Informatics Platform, managers and decision makers in the field are afforded an excellent resource to investigate the latest available information and take action in the form of ordering experimental analysis or designing studies.

At the heart of the content pack is metadata describing well-defined gene chip experiments focused on the retina in mice (mus musculus). Using a technique pioneered by the Swaroop laboratory at the University of Michigan, these experiments focus on gene profiling of photoreceptors at different stages of development and differentiation. The experimental data is annotated with nearly a hundred genes of specific interest.

Gene profiles of human and mouse whole retina are available. It can be difficult to decipher any useful information from these datasets since the whole retina contains a complex array of neural and glial elements including several types of photoreceptors, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, ganglion cells, and bipolar cells. A systematic analysis of individual cell types rather than the whole tissue such as rod and cone gene expression patterns that are implicated in a variety of retinal diseases is of extreme importance.

Recently, studies of transcription factor Neural Retina Leucine zipper (NRL) have provided key insights into photoreceptor development. NRL is essential for rod differentiation and plays a major role in regulating gene expression. NRL deficiency in mice leads to transformation of rods to cones, and expression of NRL converts cone precursors to rods. ECP1 includes expression profiles of the wild type and Nrl-/- mouse retina at three time points (P2, P10 and 2 months) representing distinct stages of photoreceptor differentiation.

In addition to the Nrl-knockout study, ECP1 includes annotations of a dataset focused on NR2E3, a rod-specific orphan nuclear receptor. NRL, CRX and NR2E3 are key transcriptional regulators that control photoreceptor differentiation. Mutations in NR2E3 lead to loss of rods, increased density of S-cones, and supernormal S-cone-mediated vision in humans. A third study in ECP1 investigates gene expression during photoreceptor differentiation using GFP positive photoreceptors purified from the WT-Gfp or Nrl-knockout-Gfp retina. Overall, these datasets are an excellent source to study gene regulatory network of photoreceptor development. The obtained gene profiles and network information from ECP could potentially provide a link to several photoreceptor-related eye diseases.

Eye Content Pack also features two special reports for delving into eye-related research. Eye diseases and tissues are both hand curated from larger ontologies in order to map gene and protein information against eye-related symptoms and targets. Together with the incorporated gene experimental data, these reports form a full-fledged Research Decision Support environment for teams working on discovering targets and developing therapies for eye-related disease.

Coming soon

Additional content packs are planned for release in 2008 and will include information for new therapeutic areas and indications. Contact us for more details.