A team from UCMM develops a new reference resource for other diabetes researchers
Orange County, CA - March 15th 2017 - Insulin, the hormone responsible for blood sugar regulation in the body, a major factor in developing diabetes, is produced in the pancreas. The cells producing the insulin are formulated in the pancreatic islets and appear randomly dispersed among the thousands in the organ. The focal point of research often is the quantity and distribution of insulin-producing cells. Analyses of cross-sections of pancreatic tissue allow for the comprehensive visualization of the pancreas. However these studies are often plagued with large margins of error resulting from two-dimensional data and provide little worthwhile information.
To help form a fully fleshed out image of the pancreas, Ulf Ahlgren and his research team at the Umeå Centre for Molecular Medicine (UCMM) developed new means of generating three-dimensional images of insulin cell distribution based on optical projection tomography (OPT). Similar to the way a medical CT scanner is operated, the technique differs by using regular light in place of x-rays. The team hopes their research provides visual and quantitative information that will help others in the field.
"We believe that the current publication represents the most comprehensive anatomical and quantitative description of insulin cell distribution in the pancreas. By making these datasets accessible to other researchers, the data will be available for use as a powerful tool for a great number of diabetes studies,” said Ahlgren, a professor in molecular medicine at Umeå University. “Examples may include planning of stereological analyses, in the development of non-invasive imaging techniques or various types of computational modelling and statistical analyses."
The datasets were published in Scientific Data and then used in a subsequent study published in Scientific Reports. The datasets include both tomographic and 3D images with information on the volume of individual pancreatic islets and their 3D location and appearance throughout the pancreas. This data constitutes for both healthy and obese mice used in the study, the obese mice used were considered genetically predisposed to develop obesity and diabetes.
These mice are often used as models in initial metabolic change studies for it can lead to the development of type 2 diabetes. In the study researchers used the 3D data to note changes in the pancreatic islets of the obese mice. The sophisticated technique allowed researchers to show a high number of these mice develop lacerations in the pancreatic islets that exhibit cyst-like masses. The data showed the cuts result from internal bleeding caused by an increase in blood flow and instability of blood vessels.
Moving forward the researchers plan to study if similar intra-islet damage forms in different models of type-2 diabetes for it could be an indicator of the diabetic phenotype.
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A team from UCMM develops a new reference resource for other diabetes researchers Orange County, CA – March 15th 2017 – Insulin, the hormone responsible for blood sugar regulation in the body, a major factor in developing diabetes, is produced in the pancreas. The cells producing the insulin are formulated in the pancreatic islets and appear […]