GSE98370
A gene expression study of the developing human eye
There is a vast range of tools with which to study the cells and tissues of the human body, however the scarcity of human embryonic material as a resource for direct study means that there is still limited data on the specific expression patterns which exist during human development. While embryonic studies are common place in other mammalian organisms and these have contributed greatly to our knowledge, characterising the events which occur during human development specifically is crucial in order to extrapolate the differences which exist between humans and other organisms and understand the human situation more completely. Establishing and maintaining collections of human developmental tissue for direct study requires significant time and resources, and is not a viable option for all. For this reason the creation of an atlas defining the key events which occur during human eye development would be of great value to the field. Through the Human Developmental Biology Resource we have collected human developmental eye tissue from post conception week 4 to 19 and performed gene expression studies using RNA sequencing. This study begins to reveal the spatiotemporal gene expression patterns which occur during normal human eye ontogenesis and represents a benchmark for comparison with development, disease and cellular differentiation studies. Overall design: 32 samples, which include 10 embryonic, 19 foetal and 3 adult samples