Three labs at Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) have combined forces to produce the first major map of stem cells that can be used in the study of retinal eye diseases. It was published in the international scientific journal, Stem Cell Reports, this week.
The authors of the paper were Hani Kim, Michelle O’Hara-Wright, Daniel Kim, To Ha Loi, Benjamin Lim, Robyn Jamieson, Anai Gonzalez Cordero and Pengyi Yang.
Associate Professor Yang leads CMRI's Computational Systems Biology Group, Dr Gonzalez Cordero leads the Stem Cell Medicine Group, and Professor Jamieson who is head of the Eye Genetics Unit also works in the Sydney Children's Hospitals Network. A/Prof Yang is from The University of Sydney's Faculty of Science, and Dr Gonzalez Cordero and Prof Jamieson have appointments in the Faculty of Medicine and Health. The other authors of the publication work within these three labs. All are affiliated with Luminesce Alliance, which supports the development of precision medicine approaches for treating serious childhood diseases.
Together, the CMRI scientists have used their expertise in computational methodologies and retinal organoid production, and combined knowledge of the retina to produce this map.
Studying the identity of cells within complex tissues such as the human retina is essential for research into development and disease. However, access to human retinal tissues is limited. CMRI’s Stem Cell Medicine Group are specialists in organoids ("mini-organs"). They transform samples of skin or blood into stem cells in the lab and then program these stem cells to turn into retinal cells which can be used for research. While these stem cell-derived retinal cells have been used to study the retina for some time now, a detailed evaluation of their molecular and cellular identity and an analysis of how closely they resemble retinal cells in the human eye has not previously been done.
In this work published in Stem Cell Reports, the CMRI scientists compiled a retinal cell identity map from mature retinas and also from retinas from a wide range of developmental stages and uncovered previously unknown biomarkers of major retinal cell types from both child and adult tissue. They then benchmarked the current protocols for retinal organoid generation based on the retinal cell identity map they compiled.
CMRI Director Professor Roger Reddel said, "This is an outstanding example of what can be achieved through the combined expertise of multidisciplinary teams."
Lead author Associate Professor Pengyi Yang noted that this analysis of retinal cell identities had enabled the discovery of an array of previously unknown marker genes for retinal cell types and also established a computational framework for evaluating the fidelity of retinal organoids in resembling the retina, a key advance for using them to understand health and disease in the human eye.