Genetic Engineering and Molecular Studies of Insulin Secreting Cells

This book reveals some details of research done at Marshall University, USA, involving functional aspects of pancreatic beta cells in several experimental models: avian, transgenic mice, and beta-cell lines. In this book you will gain some knowledge of genetic engineering approaches to improve beta-cell insulin secretion which could be applied to manage models and cases of diabetes mellitus. This work is presented as three separate chapters. The first chapter aims to gain an understanding of the expression pattern of CaBP28k in the chicken pancreas and to explore its spatial relationships with insulin in beta cells. The second chapter is to identify the influence of CaBP28k-ablation on the dynamics of [Ca2+]i in response to glucose stimulation in murine beta cells of CaBP28k-KO mice pancreatic islets and wildtype islets. The third chapter is an attempt to elucidate the genomic and non-genomic effects of in vitro CaBP28k-ablation in a cultured beta-cell line. It highlights the effects on the gene expression profile and insulin secretory responses from cultured rat insulinoma cell lines using antisense oligonucleotides transfection.