Meidong Zhu

　　澳大利亚悉尼大学

　　Global warming is a hot topic in the current world.An international agreement was established on December 11，1997 in Kyoto Japan，the“Kyoto Protocol”，in which，all the participating nations committed themselves to tackling the issue of global warming and reducing greenhouse gas emission.When we move our attention from the big globe to the small globe–the eye globe，there is also a hot topic on methods for corneal tissue preservation for transplantation.Currently there are two methods of corneal preservation：hyperthermia–corneal tissues are cultured in organ culture media at 31-35oC(warm)and hypothermic storage–corneal tissues are stored in preservation media at 4oC(cold).Whereas participants in Kyoto Protocol including most European countries and New Zealand use an organ culture preservation method，non-participants such as the USA and most developing countries use a hypothermic storage method.All Eye Banks in Australia use a hypothermic storage technique with a common storage media，Optisol，officially approved by the TGA.However，since the Rudd government signed the Kyoto Protocol in December 2007，the warm organ culture method has also been implemented in the Eye Banks of Victoria and New South Wales.Here the advantages and disadvantages of these two different methods including donor selection，media，storage period，procedures and tissue qualities combining literature review and our own practical experiences are compared.This provides some basic ideas and possibly some guidelines to assist the Eye Bank staff and clinicians in using the corneal tissues stored in different media–warm or cold.