Sirtuin 6 (Sirt6), a chromatin associated class III deacetylase, controls whole-body energy homeostasis and has a critical role in glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS) in pancreatic β cells. However, its underlying molecular mechanism remains poorly understood. To gain further insights, we studied the pathway by which Sirt6 regulates GSIS utilizing mice lacking Sirt6 in their β cells (βS...

The recent success in restoring normoglycemia in type 1 diabetes by islet cell transplantation indicates that cell replacement therapy of this severe disease is achievable. However, the severe lack of donor islets has increased the demand for alternative sources of beta-cells, such as adult and embryonic stem cells. Here, we investigate the potential of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to dif...

Directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into functional insulin-producing beta-like cells holds great promise for cell replacement therapy for patients suffering from diabetes. This approach also offers the unique opportunity to study otherwise inaccessible aspects of human beta cell development and function in vitro. Here, we show that current pancreatic progenitor differentia...

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of palmitoleate on insulin secretion and insulin mRNA levels, and to investigate the transcriptional regulation of insulin. INS-1 rat insulinoma cells were treated with palmitoleate in the presence of high glucose, and the amount of secreted insulin was measured via radioimmunoassay. Reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain rea...

Feature extraction is a crucial step in most cytometry studies. In this paper a systematic approach to feature extraction is presented. The feature sets that have been developed and used for quantitative cytology at the Laboratory for Biomedical Image Analysis of the GSF as well as at the Center for Image Analysis in Uppsala over the last 25 years are described and illustrated. The feature sets...

One of the new promising therapies in treatment of diabetes mellitus is mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) which have an interesting therapeutic potentiality based on their paracrine effect and transdifferentiation potentiality. Also obestatin improves the generation of functional β cells/islet-like cell clusters in vitro, suggesting implications for cell-based replacement therapy in diabetes. So th...

Compelling evidence has indicated that dysregulated glucose metabolism links Alzheimer's disease (AD) and diabetes mellitus (DM) via glucose metabolic products. Nevertheless, because of the lack of appropriate animal models, whether chronic hyperglycemia worsens AD pathologies in vivo remains to be confirmed. Here, we crossed diabetic mice (Pdx1(+/-) mice) with Alzheimer mice (APP/PS1 transgeni...

Despite much progress in identifying transcriptional regulators that control the specification of the different pancreatic endocrine cell types, the spatiotemporal aspects of endocrine subtype specification have remained largely elusive. Here, we address the mechanism by which the transcription factors Nkx6.1 (Nkx6-1) and Nkx6.2 (Nkx6-2) orchestrate development of the endocrine alpha- and beta-...

BACKGROUND To develop surrogate insulin-producing cells for diabetes therapy, adult stem cells have been identified in various tissues and studied for their conversion into β-cells. Pancreatic progenitor cells are derived from the endodermal epithelium and formed in a manner similar to gut progenitor cells. Here, we generated insulin-producing cells from the intestinal epithelial cells that ind...