Background: Circulating free fatty acids are often elevated in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and obese individuals. Chronic exposure to high levels of saturated fatty acids has detrimental effects on islet function and insulin secretion. Altered gene expression and epigenetics may contribute to T2D and obesity. However, there is limited information on whether fatty acids alter the genome-...

The therapeutic potential of stem cells has led to renewed interest in regenerative biology. Pancreatic stellate cells have been reported in the mammalian pancreas; however, there are very few reports on stellate cells in the chicken pancreas. The intercalated duct epithelial cells observed in the A and B islets of the chicken pancreas have been claimed to be stellate cells from their morpholog...

Human proinsulin with C-peptide-bearing Superfolder Green Fluorescent Protein (CpepSfGFP) has been expressed in transgenic mice, driven by the Ins1 promoter. The protein, expressed exclusively in β-cells, is processed and stored as CpepSfGFP and human insulin comprising only ∼0.04% of total islet proinsulin plus insulin, exerting no metabolic impact. The kinetics of the release of insulin and C...

Endurance training has been shown to increase pancreatic β-cell function and mass. However, whether exercise modulates β-cell growth and survival pathways signaling is not completely understood. This study investigated the effects of exercise on growth and apoptotic markers levels in rat pancreatic islets. Male Wistar rats were randomly assigned to 8-wk endurance training or to a sedentary cont...

The liver is the current site for pancreatic islet transplantation, but has many drawbacks due to immunologic and nonimmunologic factors. We asked whether pancreatic islets could be engrafted in the bone marrow (BM), an easily accessible and widely distributed transplant site that may lack the limitations seen in the liver. Syngeneic islets engrafted efficiently in the BM of C57BL/6 mice render...

The regenerative process in the pancreas is of particular interest because diabetes results from an inadequate number of insulin-producing beta cells and pancreatic cancer may arise from the uncontrolled growth of progenitor/stem cells. Continued and substantial growth of islet tissue occurs after birth in rodents and humans, with additional compensatory growth in response to increased demand. ...

The developmental origin of a pancreatic precursor cell could provide clues to properties that may be crucial to its molecular regulation and therapeutic potential. Previously, lineage tracing experiments showed that multipotent precursors in mouse islets had a pancreatic and not a neural crest developmental origin. However, a different Cre reporter system reveals that there is, in fact, a rare...

We measured the impact of chronic late gestation hypoglycemia on pancreatic islet structure and function to determine the cause of decreased insulin secretion in this sheep model of fetal nutrient deprivation. Late gestation hypoglycemia did not decrease pancreas weight, insulin content, beta-cell area, beta-cell mass, or islet size. The pancreatic islet isolation procedure selected a group of ...

The isolation of pancreatic islets from collagenase-digested Wistar rat pancreas was shown by the sedimentation method at a unit gravity using Percoll solution with a density of 1.041 g/ml. The density of digested exocrine tissues was in the range of 1.013-1.041 g/ml, while that of purely isolated islets was in the narrow range of 1.066-1.075 g/ml. More than a hundred islets were obtained freel...

Genotype/expression correlation in human pancreatic cDNAs. Isolated pancreatic islets were prepared by collagenase digestion and density gradient purification (1; 2). After isolation, islets were cultured free-floating in M199 culture medium (Sigma-Aldrich) at 5.5 mmol/l glucose concentration. Within 3 days of isolation, the islets were used for RNA extraction. Total RNA was extracted from the ...