Functional maturation of rat beta cells

The weaning period consist of a critical postnatal window for structural and physiologic maturation of rat beta cells. To investigate transcriptome changes involved in the maturation of beta cells neighboring this period we performed microarray analysis in FACS beta cell enriched populations to detail the global programme of gene expression to identify its changes during this process. Male Wistar rats were selected at the initial point of a postnatal critical period (postnatal 20d) for pancreatic maturation for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix microarrays. We obtained immature and mature beta cell-enriched populations from postnatal 20d and 2 months animals in order to compare their expression profiles. To that end, we used primary cultured FACS-enriched beta cell populations according to their FSC, SSC and autoflourescence. We used three replicates for each condition.