Transcriptional alterations induced by INGAP-PP in rat islets

ALGAÑARÁS, M; HEIDENREICH, AC; ROMERO, A; ROMÁN, CL; GAGLIARDINO, JJ; MAIZTEGUI, B; FLORES, LE; RODRÍGUEZ SEGUÍ, SA

Congreso; XI Argentinian Congress of Bioinformatics and Computational BIology (XI-CAB2C); 2021

Asociación Argentina de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional (A2B2C)

Introduction: Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is characterized by an impaired pancreatic β-cell mass/function together with an insulin resistant state. INGAP is a pancreatic protein that modulates β-cell mass and insulin secretion in presence of secretagogues, and its effects are also achieved by its derivate pentadecapeptide (INGAP-PP). Aim: Uncover gene expression changes induced by the INGAP-PP rat islet treatment, and relate them to its known physiological effects. Methods: RNA-seq data was generated from isolated rat pancreatic islets previously cultured with/without INGAP-PP (n=3). Sequence read alignment was performed using HiSAT, followed by Stringtie for de novo gene annotation, transcript expression quantification and normalization. Public experimental data from rat brain, liver and islets were used to evaluate the tissue-specificity pattern of expression. Results: A Linear Mixed Effects Model was applied to account for inter-replicate gene expression changes. This allowed identifying 2,008 genes whose expression was significantly modulated by INGAP-PP (p