Cell Atlas of the Neural Retina

This project will establish a cell reference atlas of the human neural retina, build a high-resolution spatial map for all cell types in the retina, and develop single cell classification and integrative analysis software tools.

The prevalence of many common visual disorders differs significantly among ethnic groups, yet the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying these differences remains elusive. To understand how genetic background contributes to the cell types in the human visual system, this group will perform single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq for retinae donated from female and male African American individuals. This new data will clarify differences in cell subtype composition, gene expression, and pathway activity across ethnic groups and provide important insights to inform the development of targeted therapies.

This Network was awarded the CZI Seed Networks Incentive to Support Diversity for the Human Cell Atlas.

This team sequenced over 1 million single nuclei from 20 different donors thus far in the generation of the neural retina cell atlas. From this data, they generated a subset of 300,000 nuclei to identify cell type-specific markers to be used in image-based transcriptomic experiments to better understand the spatial transcriptomic landscape of the human retina.