Precursor cells of mouse endocrine pancreas coexpress insulin, glucagon and the neuronal proteins tyrosine hydroxylase and neuropeptide Y, but not pancreatic polypeptide
Open Access
- 1 August 1993
- journal article
- Published by The Company of Biologists in Development
- Vol. 118 (4) , 1031-1039
- https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.118.4.1031
Abstract
The early progenitor cells to the pancreatic islets in the mouse have been characterized so as to re-examine their possible lineage relationships to the four islet cell types found in mature islets. Insulin and glucagon were both first expressed at embryonic day 9.5, and many cells co-expressed these two markers, as shown by light and electron microscopic analysis using double-label immunohistochemistry. Incubation of embryonic pancreas with 1% glutaraldehyde, a fixative commonly used by electron microscopists, abolished this reactivity, thereby explaining reported difficulties in detecting these precursor cells. Using antisera specific for neu-ropeptide Y (NPY) a peptide with considerable homology to pancreatic polypeptide (PP), we show that NPY first appears with insulin and glucagon immunore-activity at E9.5, and is co-expressed with glucagon in a majority of adult cells. As we have previously reported, PP itself is first detectable immunocytochemically at postnatal day 1 with PP-specific antibodies. However, antibodies raised against bovine PP are shown by dot blotting to recognize NPY with comparable avidity, indi-cating that a recent report of islet progenitor cells containing PP at E9.5 (Herrera, P. L., Huarte, J., Sanvito, F., Meda, P., Orci, L. and Vassalli, J. D. (1991) Devel-opment 113, 1257-1265), actually represents cross-reactivity to NPY. The data support a model in which early precursor cells to the endocrine pancreas co-activate and co-express a set of islet cell hormone and neural genes, whose expression is both selectively increased and extinguished as development proceeds, concomitant with a restriction to the patterns of expression characteristic of mature islet cell types.Keywords
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