Progress in Biochemistry and Biophysics 2006;0(12):-

Study of The Effect on Islets Cultured In vitro and STZ-induced Diabetic Rats In vivo of EGF-like Domain of Betacellulin

Hong LI ; Weibin ZHOU ; Fengying LI ; Yanyun GU ; Jingyan TIAN ; Lei QIAN ; Di ZHANG ; Wenzhong ZHOU ; Guoting WU ; Tianhong LUO ; Guo LI ; Min LUO

Keywords

betacellulin, cloning, fusion protein, islet, transfection, diabetes mellitus

Country

China

Language

Chinese

Abstract

Betacellulin (BTC) is one of "islets regeneration factors" which received more and more attention these years. BTCe is the C-terminal 50-residue region of mature BTC protein and can bind with erbB-1?erbB-4 receptor. It has the same mitogenic activity on cells as the whole section. BTC and BTCe can improve the level of glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS) during islets culture in vitro though they had no effect on the acute insulin secretion. BTCe also effectively ameliorated the hyperglycemia of STZ-induced diabetic rats by a single plasmid injection into muscle of rats. It is supposed that BTCe promote the proliferation of PDX-1 positive cells or repair some signal transduction pathway. Perhaps the latter is more important.