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Abstract: Acute pancreatitis (AP) is a sudden inflammation of the exocrine part of the pancreas, resulting in self-digestion and destruction of exocrine tissue. The intricate relationship between exocrine and endocrine functions is pivotal, as damage to acinar cells can affect endocrine cell function and vice versa. However, our understanding of these interactions remains limited. An effective strategy for investigating pancreatic cells involves the utilization of live in-situ acute mouse pancreas tissue slice preparations, combined with noninvasive fluorescent calcium labeling of endocrine or exocrine cells, and subsequent analysis using confocal laser scanning microscopy. Nevertheless, this approach encounters inherent conflicts with conventional methodologies employed to histologically assess the severity of tissue damage due to AP in the model. Traditional methods involve fixing and staining tissue samples with hematoxylin and eosin, thereby precluding live-cell imaging. In this study, our objective was to introduce an innovative method utilizing a commercial fluorescence Live/Dead assay that enables calcium imaging and tissue damage assessment in the same sample. This approach was validated against the classical histological grading of AP severity, and we found a good correlation between the classical histological grading method and the in-situ approach employing the Live/Dead assay. The primary advantage of our novel approach lies in its capacity to enable timely and efficient live-cell imaging together with damage assessment in the same tissue, thereby enabling the study of functional consequences of structural damage at the cellular level and reducing the number of animals required for experimentation.
Keywords: acute pancreatitis, pancreatic tissue damage, exocrine and endocrine interactions, live cell imaging, confocal laser scanning microscopy, calcium imaging, live/dead assay, tissue slice preparation, histological grading
Published in DKUM: 22.08.2025; Views: 0; Downloads: 5
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Abstract: Background: The crucial steps in beta cell stimulus-secretion coupling upon stimulation with glucose are oscillatory changes in metabolism, membrane potential, intracellular calcium concentration, and exocytosis. The changes in membrane potential consist of bursts of spikes, with silent phases between them being dominated by membrane repolarization and absence of spikes. Assessing intra- and intercellular coupling at the multicellular level is possible with ever-increasing detail, but our current ability to simultaneously resolve spikes from many beta cells remains limited to double-impalement electrophysiological recordings. Methods: Since multicellular calcium imaging of spikes would enable a better understanding of coupling between changes in membrane potential and calcium concentration in beta cell collectives, we set out to design an appropriate methodological approach. Results: Combining the acute tissue slice method with ultrafast calcium imaging, we were able to resolve and quantify individual spikes within bursts at a temporal resolution of >150 Hz over prolonged periods, as well as describe their glucose-dependent properties. In addition, by simultaneous patch-clamp recordings we were able to show that calcium spikes closely follow membrane potential changes. Both bursts and spikes coordinate across islets in the form of intercellular waves, with bursts typically displaying global and spikes more local patterns. Conclusions: This method and the associated findings provide additional insight into the complex signaling within beta cell networks. Once extended to tissue from diabetic animals and human donors, this approach could help us better understand the mechanistic basis of diabetes and find new molecular targets.
Keywords: beta cell, calcium imaging, calcium oscillations, calcium spikes, physiology
Published in DKUM: 24.01.2025; Views: 0; Downloads: 9
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Abstract: NMDA receptors promote repolarization in pancreatic beta cells and thereby reduce glucose-stimulated insulin secretion. Therefore, NMDA receptors are a potential therapeutic target for diabetes. While the mechanism of NMDA receptor inhibition in beta cells is rather well understood at the molecular level, its possible effects on the collective cellular activity have not been addressed to date, even though proper insulin secretion patterns result from well-synchronized beta cell behavior. The latter is enabled by strong intercellular connectivity, which governs propagating calcium waves across the islets and makes the heterogeneous beta cell population work in synchrony. Since a disrupted collective activity is an important and possibly early contributor to impaired insulin secretion and glucose intolerance, it is of utmost importance to understand possible effects of NMDA receptor inhibition on beta cell functional connectivity. To address this issue, we combined confocal functional multicellular calcium imaging in mouse tissue slices with network science approaches. Our results revealed that NMDA receptor inhibition increases, synchronizes, and stabilizes beta cell activity without affecting the velocity or size of calcium waves. To explore intercellular interactions more precisely, we made use of the multilayer network formalism by regarding each calcium wave as an individual network layer, with weighted directed connections portraying the intercellular propagation. NMDA receptor inhibition stabilized both the role of wave initiators and the course of waves. The findings obtained with the experimental antagonist of NMDA receptors, MK-801, were additionally validated with dextrorphan, the active metabolite of the approved drug dextromethorphan, as well as with experiments on NMDA receptor KO mice. In sum, our results provide additional and new evidence for a possible role of NMDA receptor inhibition in treatment of type 2 diabetes and introduce the multilayer network paradigm as a general strategy to examine effects of drugs on connectivity in multicellular systems.
Keywords: pancreas, beta cells, insulin, Islets of Langerhans
Published in DKUM: 29.11.2024; Views: 0; Downloads: 6
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Abstract: Many details of glucose-stimulated intracellular calcium changes in [beta] cells during activation, activity, and deactivation, as well as their concentration-dependence, remain to be analyzed. Classical physiological experiments indicated that in islets, functional differences between individual cells are largely attenuated, but recent findings suggest considerable intercellular heterogeneity, with some cells possibly coordinating the collective responses. To address the above with an emphasis on heterogeneity and describing the relations between classical physiological and functional network properties, we performed functional multicellular calcium imaging in mouse pancreas tissue slices over a wide range of glucose concentrations. During activation, delays to activation of cells and any-cell-to-first-responder delays are shortened, and the sizes of simultaneously responding clusters increased with increasing glucose concentrations. Exactly the opposite characterized deactivation. The frequency of fast calcium oscillations during activity increased with increasing glucose up to 12 mM glucose concentration, beyond which oscillation duration became longer, resulting in a homogenous increase in active time. In terms of functional connectivity, islets progressed from a very segregated network to a single large functional unit with increasing glucose concentration. A comparison between classical physiological and network parameters revealed that the first-responders during activation had longer active times during plateau and the most active cells during the plateau tended to deactivate later. Cells with the most functional connections tended to activate sooner, have longer active times, and deactivate later. Our findings provide a common ground for recent differing views on [beta] cell heterogeneity and an important baseline for future studies of stimulus-secretion and intercellular coupling. NEW & NOTEWORTHY: We assessed concentration-dependence in coupled [beta] cells, degree of functional heterogeneity, and uncovered possible specialized subpopulations during the different phases of the response to glucose at the level of many individual cells. To this aim, we combined acute mouse pancreas tissue slices with functional multicellular calcium imaging over a wide range from threshold (7 mM) and physiological (8 and 9 mM) to supraphysiological (12 and 16 mM) glucose concentrations, classical physiological, and advanced network analyses.
Keywords: beta cells, calcium imaging, glucose-dependence, network analysis
Published in DKUM: 15.10.2024; Views: 0; Downloads: 54
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Abstract: Although mice are a very instrumental model in islet beta cell research, possible phenotypic differences between strains and substrains are largely neglected in the scientific community. In this study, we show important phenotypic differences in beta cell responses to glucose between C57BL/6J, C57BL/6N, and NMRI mice, i.e., the three most commonly used strains. High-resolution multicellular confocal imaging of beta cells in acute pancreas tissue slices was used to measure and quantitatively compare the calcium dynamics in response to a wide range of glucose concentrations. Strain- and substrain-specific features were found in all three phases of beta cell responses to glucose: a shift in the dose-response curve characterizing the delay to activation and deactivation in response to stimulus onset and termination, respectively, and distinct concentration-encoding principles during the plateau phase in terms of frequency, duration, and active time changes with increasing glucose concentrations. Our results underline the significance of carefully choosing and reporting the strain to enable comparison and increase reproducibility, emphasize the importance of analyzing a number of different beta cell physiological parameters characterizing the response to glucose, and provide a valuable standard for future studies on beta cell calcium dynamics in health and disease in tissue slices.
Keywords: beta cell, mouse models, calcium imaging, glucose-dependence, tissue slice
Published in DKUM: 15.07.2024; Views: 148; Downloads: 22
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