Pancreatic α cells retain considerable plasticity and can, under the right circumstances, transdifferentiate into functionally mature β cells. In search of a targetable mechanistic basis, a recent paper suggested that the widely used anti-malaria drug artemether suppresses the α cell transcription factor Arx to promote transdifferentiation into β cells. However, key initial experiments in this paper were carried out in islet cell lines, and most subsequent validation experiments implied transdifferentiation without direct demonstration of α to β cell conversion. Indeed, we find no evidence that artemether promotes transdifferentiation of primary α cells into β cells. Moreover, artemether reduces Ins2 expression in primary β cells >100-fold, suppresses glucose uptake, and abrogates β cell calcium responses and insulin secretion in response to glucose. Our observations suggest that artemether induces general islet endocrine cell dedifferentiation and call into question the utility of artemisinins to promote α to β cell transdifferentiation in treating diabetes.
Pubmed ID: 29103923 RIS Download
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Software package for high-performance read alignment, quantification and mutation discovery.General purpose read aligner which can be used to map both genomic DNA-seq reads and RNA-seq reads. Subread aligner as fast, accurate and scalable read mapping by seed-and-vote.These programs were also implemented in Bioconductor R package Rsubread.
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