bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/603738; this version posted April 9, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 1 Deciphering the mechanoresponsive role of β-catenin in Keratoconus 2 epithelium 3 4 Chatterjee Amit 1,2, Prema Padmanabhan3, Janakiraman Narayanan#1 5 1 Department of Nanobiotechnology, Vision Research Foundation,Sankara Nethralaya campus, 6 Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India 7 2 School of Chemical and Biotechnology, SASTRA University, Tanjore, Tamil Nadu, India 8 3 Department of Cornea, Medical Research Foundation, Sankara Nethralaya campus, Chennai, 9 Tamil Nadu ,India 10 Running Title: β-catenin mechanotransduction in kerataconus 11 Correspondence: #Dr. Janakiraman Narayanan, Department of Nanobiotechnology, KNBIRVO 12 Block, Vision Research Foundation, Sankara Nethralaya campus 18/41, College road 13 Nungambakkam, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India 600006, Tel-+91-44-28271616, (Ext) 1358, Fax- 14 +91-44-28254180, Email:
[email protected] 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/603738; this version posted April 9, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 24 25 Abstract 26 Keratoconus (KC) a disease with established biomechanical instability of the corneal stroma, is an 27 ideal platform to identify key proteins involved in mechanosensing.