Wistow Graeme
Section on Molecular Structure and Functional Genomics, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Building 7, Room 201, Bethesda, MD 20892-0703, USA.
Prog Retin Eye Res. 2006 Jan;25(1):43-77. doi: 10.1016/j.preteyeres.2005.05.003. Epub 2005 Jul 7.
NEIBank is a project to gather and organize genomic resources for eye research. The first phase of this project covers the construction and sequence analysis of cDNA libraries from human and animal model eye tissues to develop an overview of the repertoire of genes expressed in the eye and a resource of cDNA clones for further studies. The sequence data are grouped and identified using the tools of bioinformatics and the results are displayed through a web site where they can be interrogated by keyword search, chromosome location, by Blast (sequence comparison) or by alignment on completed genomes. Many novel proteins and novel splice forms of known genes have already emerged from analysis of the accumulating data. This review provides an overview of the current state of the database for human eye tissues, with specific comparisons to some parallel data from mouse and rat, and with illustrative examples of the kinds of insights and discoveries these data can produce. One of the major themes that emerges is that at the molecular level human eye tissues have significant differences from those of rodents, encompassing species specific genes, alternative splice forms and great variation in levels of gene expression. These point to specific adaptations and mechanisms in the human eye and emphasize that care needs to be taken in the application of appropriate animal model systems.
NEIBank是一个为眼部研究收集和整理基因组资源的项目。该项目的第一阶段包括构建和分析来自人类及动物模型眼组织的cDNA文库，以全面了解眼部表达的基因库，并为进一步研究提供cDNA克隆资源。利用生物信息学工具对序列数据进行分类和识别，结果通过网站展示，用户可通过关键词搜索、染色体定位、Blast（序列比对）或与完整基因组比对来查询。对不断积累的数据进行分析后，已发现许多新的蛋白质和已知基因的新剪接形式。本综述概述了人类眼组织数据库的当前状态，并与小鼠和大鼠的一些平行数据进行了具体比较，还列举了这些数据所能产生的各类见解和发现的实例。其中一个主要观点是，在分子水平上，人类眼组织与啮齿动物的眼组织存在显著差异，包括物种特异性基因、可变剪接形式以及基因表达水平的巨大差异。这些差异表明人类眼睛存在特定的适应性和机制，也强调了在应用合适的动物模型系统时需要谨慎。
