Aqueous Humor Proteome Database Established by Medical College of Georgia
The National Eye Institute (NEI) recently announced a database that will enable researchers to better study causes of vision loss has been established by scientists at the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia.
The Aqueous Humor (AH) Proteome Database has been developed during past 5 years by Ashok Sharma, PhD, associate professor and director of the bioinformatics core in the MCG Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine, and a team of researchers from the center, the Department of Ophthalmology, and the Culver Vision Discovery Institute.
“Characterizing the human AH proteome will further our understanding of the roles of specific molecules in health and enable more in-depth studies of their relation to pathogenesis,” commented Dr. Sharma in the NEI press release. “Providing a reference database is an important step in supplementing and guiding future investigations of ocular pathology and physiology.”
According to the NEI, the new database will help eliminate that problem of changes in the proteomic composition in AH biofluid. It includes data from 307 human AH samples, comprehensive information on 1,683 proteins identified in the AH, as well as relevant clinical data for each analyzed sample.
The database is publicly accessible. As additional samples are collected and analyzed, the proteomic and corresponding clinical data will be incorporated. The research team also plans to add functions that allow other users to upload their own AH proteomic data to the database.
The research team’s work was recently published by Tae Jin Lee, PhD, et al online in Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation.
As noted in the NEI press release, the functions and interactions of the proteomic composition of are crucial to understanding cellular processes, including cell-to-cell communication, signal transduction, immunological modulation, and cell proliferation. Changes in the proteomic composition have been associated with conditions such as cataracts, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, retinoblastoma, and diabetic retinopathy.
Advances in high-resolution mass spectrometry have helped scientists take a closer look at these proteins and their associations with ocular diseases, however more research is needed and access to that technology is still limited, advised the NEI.