microRNA and mRNA expression profiles of human pancreatic islet-like cell clusters

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune destruction of pancreatic islet beta cell disease, and it is important to find new alternative source of the islet beta cells to replace the damaged cells. Human embryonic stem (hES) cells possess unlimited self-renewal and pluripotency and thus have the potential to provide an unlimited supply of different cell types for tissue replacement. The hES-T3 cells with normal female karyotype were first differentiated into embryoid bodies and then induced to generate the pancreatic islet-like cell clusters, which expressed pancreatic islet cell-specific markers of insulin, glucagon and somatostatin. The expression profiles of microRNAs and mRNAs from the pancreatic islet-like cell clusters were further analyzed and compared with those of undifferentiated hES-T3 cells and differentiated embryoid bodies. MicroRNAs negatively regulate the expression of protein-coding mRNAs. The pancreatic islet-like cell clusters were found to exhibit very high expression of microRNAs miR-186, miR-199a and miR-339, which down-regulated the expression of LIN28, PRDM1, CALB1, GCNT2, RBM47, PLEKHH1, RBPMS2 and PAK6. Therefore, these microRNAs are very likely to play important regulatory roles in the differentiation of pancreatic islet cells and early embryonic development. In this investigation, both miRNA and mRNA expression profiles from the pancreatic islet-like cell clusters differentiated from hES-T3 cells (T3pi) were quantitatively determined and compared with those of undifferentiated hES-T3 cells grown on mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) feeder (T3ES) and embryoid bodies differentiated from hES-T3 cells (T3EB). Several target genes of pancreatic islet cell-specific miRNAs were identified. ***This submission represents the mRNA expression component of the study only***