摘要 : Some years ago, I attended a research conference on the macular degeneration in the John Hopkins Medical Center where I obtained a set of textbooks named 'Principles and Practice of Ophthalmology (second edition)' by Daniel A. Alb... 展开 Some years ago, I attended a research conference on the macular degeneration in the John Hopkins Medical Center where I obtained a set of textbooks named 'Principles and Practice of Ophthalmology (second edition)' by Daniel A. Albert and Frederick A. Jakobiec. Of 6 volumes, the longest one deals with the basic sciences of ophthalmology, which contains over 1400 pages in 119 chapters by over 150 authors. If you have read this textbook and are invited to edit a special issue about molecular ophthalmology with just a few articles, you may wonder what to do with such extensive topics as I did in the beginning. Nevertheless, the eye is a beautiful organ and ocular diseases greatly affect our health. Thus, this special edition of Current Molecular Medicine contains the review articles on the pathology, the related mechanism and the possible management of the major ocular diseases. Seven articles have been selected to cover retinal pigment epithelium and retinal diseases, glaucoma and treatment, cataractogenesis derived from changes in lens structural proteins, gap junctions or cell death, and corneal disease therapy by limbal stem cells. 收起