Transcriptome Data from 260 Individual Laser-captured Islets from Non-diabetic, Autoantibody Positive and Type 1 Diabetic Organ Donors

Background: The purpose of this study was to obtain comprehensive gene expression datasets from a large number of individual islets, with defined pathological phenotypes, from organ donors with different clinical stages of type 1 diabetes. Here we will present results from an analysis that compared “normal” (Ins+CD3-) islets from the 3 clinical phenotypes: Autoantibody negative non-diabetic (C), Autoantibody positive non-diabetic (AB) and Type 1 diabetic (T1D).

Methods: We obtained pancreatic tissue from 43 male and female nPOD donors with the 3 clinical phenotypes (C=16, AB=11, T1D=16). Immunohistochemical staining of islets resulted in the following subtypes (of the 260 islets collected and analyzed for gene expression): Ins+CD3- (n=147), Ins+CD3+ (n=78), Ins-CD3+ (n=12), and Ins-CD3- (n=23). The gene expression profiles of these 260 individual islets were obtained using Affymetrix HTA 2.0 arrays. 

Results: We compared gene expression profiles of 147 islets that were Ins+CD3- from each of the 3 organ donor types. The number of transcripts differentially expressed by > 1.5 fold and p