Research Resource: RNA-Seq Reveals Unique Features of the Pancreatic beta-Cell Transcriptome

Abstract

The pancreatic beta-cell is critical for the maintenance of glycemic control. Knowing the compendium of genes expressed in beta-cells will further our understanding of this critical cell type and may allow the identification of future antidiabetes drug targets. Here, we report the use of next-generation sequencing to obtain nearly 1 billion reads from the polyadenylated RNA of islets and purified beta-cells from mice. These data reveal novel examples of beta-cell-specific splicing events, promoter usage, and over 1000 long intergenic noncoding RNA expressed in mouse beta-cells. Many of these long intergenic noncoding RNA are beta-cell specific, and we hypothesize that this large set of novel RNA may play important roles in beta-cell function. Our data demonstrate unique features of the beta-cell transcriptome. (Molecular Endocrinology 26: 1783-1792, 2012)