PNNL

Abstract

The pancreatic islets of Langerhans and insulin-producing beta cells in particular play a central role in the maintenance of glucose homeostasis and the islet dysfunction is associated with the pathogenesis of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus. To contribute to the understanding of the biology of the pancreatic islets we applied proteomic techniques based on liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. Here as an initial step we present the first comprehensive proteomic characterization of pancreas islets of the mouse, the commonly used animal model for diabetes research. Two-dimensional SCX LC/RP LC-MS/MS has been applied to characterize of the mouse islet proteome, resulting in the confident identification of 17,350 different tryptic peptides covering 2,612 proteins with at least two unique peptide identifications per protein. The dataset also allowed identification of a number of post-translational modifications including several modifications relevant to oxidative stress and phosphorylation. While many of the identified phosphorylation sites corroborates with previous known sites, the oxidative modifications observed on cysteinyl residues potentially reveal novel information related to the role of oxidation stress in islet functions. Comparative analysis of the islet proteome database with 15 available proteomic datasets from other mouse tissues and cells revealed a set of 68 proteins uniquely detected only in the pancreatic islets. Besides proteins with known functions, like islet secreted peptide hormones, this unique set contains a number of proteins with yet unknown functions. The resulting peptide and protein database will be available at ncrr.pnl.gov web site of the NCRR proteomic center (ncrr.pnl.gov).