The samples of uninjured corneal limbal epithelium (360-degree peritomy, lamellar dissection of the limbal regions, and width of 2 mm) and the corneal central epithelium (7.5 mm in diameter) were collected in healthy rabbits. Correspondingly, the recovered tissue from the previous injured area, including limbal and central corneal epithelium, was collected as mentioned above after a 16-hour injury. Total RNA was extracted from more than three biological repetitions by RNeasy kits (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany), respectively. The preparation of the complementary DNA (cDNA) library and RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) were performed by the Annoroad Gene Technology Co., Ltd. (Beijing, China) on the HiseqX-ten platform using the PE150 strategy (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA), and 6 G reads were obtained of each sample. Original sequence was filtered to obtain high-quality clean data as in a previous report.28 (link) The subsequent analysis was performed with the clean data.