Purpose: For the preservation of human donor corneas the keratocytes are becoming more and more interesting. Very few is known about this cell type, especially about the potential morphological and biochemical alterations and possible changes of growth kinetics during corneal storage.Methods: At the time of establishing cell lines of human corneal fibroblasts in our laboratory we made some investigations with fresh and cultured human corneas. We collected the available informations concerning the donor criteria and determined the growth rate (r), cumulative cell numbers (ccn) and the cumulative population doublings (cpd) of the established cell cultures between the 3. and 16. passage for characterizing their growth behaviour. The following 3 groups were investigated: 3 cultures of fresh corneas, 3 cultures of corneas stored in MEM and 3 cultures of corneas stored in MEM and MEM with 5% Dextran 500.Results: Donor criteria showed no influence on the success of inoculation. Pre-cultured keratocytes in MEM showed the best and homogenous results concerning r, ccn and cpd. The values for fresh corneas and corneas pre-cultured in MEM and MEM with 5% Dextran 500 were on a lower level.Conclusions: First our results showed that donor criteria seem to have no influence on the growth behaviour of human keratocytes. Furthermore the corneas seem to become more uniform during preservation in MEM. This pre-culture seems to have a positive influence on the culturing of isolated human corneal fibroblasts.