Absence of pork-like insulin in guinea pig tissues.

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Abstract
By using a technique for concentrating insulin 100-fold from tissue extracts with 75-95% recoveries, pork-like insulin was not detected in guinea pig tissues and thus reports from the National Institutes of Health that these tissues contain a pork-like insulin at concentrations averaging 1 ng/g were not able to be confirmed. This difference could have been due to differences in strains of guinea pigs studied or in the species specificities of the antisera used for radioimmunoassay. In the current study, tissue extracts from both NIH and Hartley guinea pigs were assayed with 3 antisera routinely used in the laboratory and 1 antiserum that had been used in the NIH laboratory. Pork-like insulin in tissues from both strains of guinea pigs as determined with the 4 antisera is < 0.02 ng/g. It is unlikely that nonpancreatic guinea pig tissues contain or sythesize a peptide resembling pork or other non-guinea pig mammalian insulin.