期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2004
卷号：101
期号：32
页码：11668-11672
DOI：10.1073/pnas.0403499101
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：There is a growing body of evidence that the nondegradable fluorophores that accumulate as the lipofuscin of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) are involved in mechanisms leading to the degeneration of RPE in macular degeneration. Most of the constituents of RPE lipofuscin are inadvertent products of the retinoid visual cycle, the enzymatic pathway by which the 11-cis-retinal chromophore of rhodopsin is generated. Indeed, a major constituent of RPE lipofuscin, the pyridinium bisretinoid A2E, is a diretinal conjugate that forms in photoreceptor cells and is deposited in RPE cells as a consequence of the phagocytosis of the outer segment membrane by RPE cells. Given the adverse effects of A2E, there is considerable interest in combating its deposition so as to protect against vision loss. These efforts, however, necessitate an understanding of factors that modulate its formation. Here we show that an amino acid variant in murine Rpe65, a visual-cycle protein required for the regeneration of 11-cis-retinal, is associated with reduced A2E accumulation.
