The corneal endothelium maintains the cornea at the low level of hydration required for transparency and good vision. The long term goals are to understand how the corneal endothelium: 1) functions under normal physiological conditions, 2) how it is compromised by disease, and 3) how it can be better maintained in vitro to improve corneal storage techniques to make more corneas available for transplant. The corneal endothelium maintains the low level of hydration by fluid movements generated by the flow of ions. Ion channels in the cell membrane play a crucial role in the control of these ion movements. We will study the structure and function of these ion channels.
The specific aims for this project period are to: 1) use the patch clamp technique to study and compare the properties of ion channels in fresh, stored, and cultured corneal endothelial cells, under different storage, media, voltage, ionic, temperature and other conditions. 2) develop, test, and use new mathematical techniques to analyze that data, including the powerful new methods of non-linear dynamics and chaos, and 3) use models of different kinetic and molecular mechanisms that will be compared to the experimental results to uncover the molecular mechanisms responsible for the observed channel properties.
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