Comprehensive characterization of fetal and mature retinal cell identity to assess the fidelity of retinal organoids
Open accessAbstract
Characterizing cell identity in complex tissues such as the human retina is essential for studying its development and disease. While retinal organoids derived from pluripotent stem cells have been widely used to model development and disease of the human retina, there is a lack of studies that have systematically evaluated the molecular and cellular fidelity of the organoids derived from various culture protocols in recapitulating their in vivo counterpart. To this end, we performed an extensive meta-atlas characterization of cellular identities of the human eye, covering a wide range of developmental stages. The resulting map uncovered previously unknown biomarkers of major retinal cell types and those associated with cell-type-specific maturation. Using our retinal-cell-identity map from the fetal and adult tissues, we systematically assessed the fidelity of the retinal organoids in mimicking the human eye, enabling us to comprehensively benchmark the current protocols for retinal organoid generation.
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Retinal organoids showed exclusive cell-specific expression of retinal cell markers.
“We used our recently described retinal atlas dataset to determine the fidelity of retinal organoids and identified the expression of the different retinal cell markers (27), confirming exclusive cell-specific expression of the markers (SI Appendix, Fig. S9).”
From Characterization of RNA editing and gene therapy with a compact CRISPR-Cas13 in the retina (2024) · cites this paper as [27]
In Results, ‘The retinal-cell-identity map uncovers novel cell-identity genes’ (page unavailable), the paper reports exclusive expression patterns for known and new retinal cell-type markers. It also benchmarks retinal organoids against human retinal tissue, but the cited passage establishes marker specificity in the retinal-cell-identity map, not exclusive marker expression in the organoids themselves. (LLM, conf=0.85)
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Cell Types of the Human Retina and Its Organoids at Single-Cell Resolution
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Characterization of RNA editing and gene therapy with a compact CRISPR-Cas13 in the retina
Kumar, S., Hsiao, Y.-W., Wong, V. H. Y., Aubin, D., Wang, J.-H., Lisowski, L., Rakoczy, E. P., Li, F., Alarcon-Martinez, L., Gonzalez-Cordero, A., et al. (2024) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2408345121 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Kim, H. J., O’Hara-Wright, M., Kim, D., Loi, T. H., Lim, B. Y., Jamieson, R. V., Gonzalez-Cordero, A., & Yang, P.
- Affiliations
- The University of Sydney (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Gonzalez-Cordero, Anai
- Yang, Pengyi
- ORCID
- Venue
- Stem Cell Reports
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2023-01
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 175-189
- ISSN
- 2213-6711 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC9860116
- OpenAlex
- W4315489784
- Cited by
- 26
- References
- 4
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 3
- FWCI
- 2.32
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Stem Cell Reports (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Children’s Medical Research Institute
- National Health and Medical Research Council (1173469)
- Ophthalmic Research Institute of Australia
- University of Sydney
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Retinal Development and Disorders
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Pluripotent Stem Cells Research
- Keywords
- retinal organoids, pluripotent stem cells, biomarkers, fetal retina, benchmarking
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Cell Differentiation, Humans, Neurons, Organoids, Retina, Pluripotent Stem Cells, Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells
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