Objective:

Develop AI-powered computational tools to identify biological regulators associated with ocular health and disease and improve understanding of eye disease mechanisms.

Approach:

• Project: A four-year project led by Xinlei (Sherry) Wang at the University of Texas at Arlington, with Lin Xu of UT Southwestern Medical Center, received a $1.96 million National Eye Institute grant.
• Genomic analysis: Develop scalable algorithms to analyze large genomic datasets and identify transcriptional regulators associated with ocular health and disease.
• Cell-type analysis: Develop a tool to computationally separate cell-type signals in whole-tissue samples, enabling investigation of cell-specific regulatory activity without single-cell experiments for every regulator.

Key Findings:

• The project is developing two complementary tools for studying ocular regulation at tissue and cell-type levels.
• The tools are intended to help identify regulatory pathways for further investigation.

Interpretation:

The researchers’ long-term goal is to improve understanding of eye disease mechanisms and help identify promising directions for future diagnostics and targeted therapies.

Limitations:

• The source describes planned tool development; it does not report completed tools or validation results.

Sources:

• University of Texas at Arlington