Description
The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) is a polarized cell layer that is critical for photoreceptor function and survival. Its unique relationship to the photoreceptors and its specific physiology makes the RPE a critical determinant of human vision. Therefore we performed global expression profiling of native and cultured human fetal and adult RPE and determined a unique set of highly-expressed genes (called the signature set) by comparing the observed RPE gene profiles to the Novartis expression database (SymAtlas: http://wombat.gnf.org/index.html) of 78 tissues.