Increasingly Nervous

Type 1 diabetes is caused by the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas’ islets of Langerhans, leading to high blood glucose. Yet islet cells don’t exist in isolation: they interact with other cell types and receive input from neurons, all of which can affect their behaviour. To explore the role of the pancreatic environment in diabetes, scientists need to see inside the whole organ. Tissue clearing, a technique using solvents to make whole tissues transparent, enabled researchers to examine beta cells (labelled by insulin, in green) and neurons (in magenta) throughout the pancreas. Compared to healthy tissue (left), diabetic mice (right) suffer a dramatic decrease in the number of islets and size of beta cells, but the remaining islets are more densely innervated. Altered neural connections are just one feature highlighted by this new way of mapping the pancreas, which could help us to better understand diabetes.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Emmanuelle Briolat

Writer

A researcher specialising in visual signals in Lepidoptera, camouflage and the effects of light pollution, Emmanuelle’s writing covers a range of topics, from biomedical research to children’s books about moth defences.

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• Image from work by Alexandra Alvarsson, Maria Jimenez-Gonzalez, Rosemary Li, Carolina Rosselot and colleagues
• Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism Institute, Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Diseases, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, October 2020