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Clore Laboratory: News
Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolic Research
13 September 2005 – Gene expression changes in pancreatic islets
Jacqueline O’Dowd, a research fellow at the Clore Laboratory, University of Buckingham, UK, has described a comparison of gene expression in pancreatic islets from strains of mice that differ in their sensitivity to diabetes in a poster at the 41st Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), held in Athens, Greece, 10-15 September 2005.
Dysfunction of the insulin producing β-cells of the islets of Langerhans is an essential feature of type 2 as well as type 1 diabetes. In type 2 diabetes, dysfunction of the islets is usually precipitated by insulin resistance, which results in an increased demand on the insulin producing capacity of the islet. Both humans and mice vary, however, in the sensitivity of their β-cells to such demands. In her studies, Jacqueline O’Dowd found that the gene encoding the opioid molecule dynorphin was expressed at a lower level in C57Bl/Ks mice, which are more susceptible to developing diabetes than C57Bl/6 mice. Mice that lacked the gene encoding dynorphin (provided by Professor Andreas Zimmer, University of Bonn, Germany) had relative hyperglycaemia.
The full reference to the abstract is:
O’Dowd J, Cornick C, Stocker CJ, Wang SJY, Cawthorne MA, Arch JRS. Identification of preprodynorphin as a pancreatic gene associated with increased susceptibility to diabetes. Diabetologia 2005 48(Suppl 1): A158, Abs 425