DECONVOLUTION OF RAT PANCREATIC ISLET RNA-SEQ TO UNCOUPLE ISLET CELL COMPOSITION EFFECT FROM INGAP PEPTIDE TREATMENT

ANA CAROLINA HEIDENREICH; AGUSTIN ROMERO; CAROLINA L. ROMAN; JUAN J. GAGLIARDINO

Congreso; 1st Congress of Women in Bioinformatics and Data science LA; 2020

The occurrence of diabetes mellitus is characterized by pancreatic β-cell lossand chronic hyperglycemia. The Islet Neogenesis Associated Proteinpentadecapeptide (INGAP-PP) has been shown to improve β-cell function andinduce β-cell regeneration in hamster, rat and mouse animal models.In this work, we performed RNA-seq assays on rat pancreatic islets treated invitro with INGAP-PP to gain insights into the mechanisms modulated by thepeptide treatment. Sequence read alignment was performed using HiSAT,followed by Stringtie for de novo gene annotation, transcript expressionquantification and normalization across samples. Noteworthy, the INGAP-PPcan induce transcriptional changes on several of the cell types that form theislets. Indeed, a standard RNA-seq analysis pipeline did not allow a cleardiscrimination of the INGAP-PP treatment transcriptional effects. Thisobservation prompted us to optimize a deconvolution of the transcriptionaleffects.