Abstract
The corneal endothelium maintains corneal transparency; consequently, damage to this endothelium by a number of pathological conditions results in severe vision loss. Publicly available expression databases of human tissues are useful for investigating the pathogenesis of diseases and for developing new therapeutic modalities; however, databases for ocular tissues, and especially the corneal endothelium, are poor. Here, we have generated a transcriptome dataset from the ribosomal RNA-depleted total RNA from the corneal endothelium of eyes from seven Caucasians without ocular diseases. The results of principal component analysis and correlation coefficients (ranged from 0.87 to 0.96) suggested high homogeneity of our RNA-Seq dataset among the samples, as well as sufficient amount and quality. The expression profile of tissue-specific marker genes indicated only limited, if any, contamination by other layers of the cornea, while the Smirnov-Grubbs test confirmed the absence of outlier samples. The dataset presented here should be useful for investigating the function/dysfunction of the cornea, as well as for extended transcriptome analyses integrated with expression data for non-coding RNAs.