Human beta cell proliferation induced by inhibition of Dyrk1a and GSK3b. Rattus norvegicus

Purpose: Single-cell whole transcriptome sequencing was used to better understand the mechanism of action of our Dyrk1a inhibitor's proliferation of pancreatic islets. Methods: primary pancreatic islets were isolated, cultured, and stimulated with either 0.1% DMSO or 3 µM GNF4877. Single cells were captured and cDNA isolated on a Fluidigm C1 instrument. Sequencing libraries were made with Nextera XT reagents (Illumina) and single-end 50 bp reads were generated on an Illumina HiSeq 1000. Reads were mapped to the rat transcriptome. Results: Consistent with GNF4877 eliciting beta cell proliferation, we observed an increase in the number of beta cells co-expressing insulin 1 and genes involved in cell cycle including the M phase marker Cyclin B1. Comparison of Cyclin B1 expressing cells from GNF4877-treated islets to beta cells from DMSO-treated islets further revealed a significant increase expression of genes associated with full cell cycle progression and enrichment of Gene Ontology (GO) categories for proliferation. Conclusions: Since only a small subset of islet cells proliferate when stimulated with GNF4877, single-cell transcriptome sequencing allowed us to examine expression of genes co-regulated with known proliferation markers and will hopefully allow us to characterize beta cell subsets which are responsive to proliferation-associated therapies. Overall design: 84 GNF4877-treated and 86 DMSO-treated rat islet cells containing greater than 100,000 mapped sequencing reads per cell and having a single verified cell per port were compared