oa Epigenetic changes in beta cells related to high glucose

Background & Objectives: Epigenetic changes include two types of changes DNA methylation and Histone modifications. These modifications are influenced by the change in various environmental factors resulting in a stable form of gene expression changes. Type II Diabetes incidence keeps rising with so little understanding of the actual cause at gene expression level despite the massive amount of research around the subject. Which is why we chose to capture a closer image of what happens at the genome level when environmental factors such as high glucose intake can influence healthy cells into change their gene expression to adapt and how is that related to Diabetes. Methods: Mouse Beta cells are grown for several generations at various glucose concentrations in two groups, each group consisting of three biological replicates, each replica of glucose concentration (High vs. Normal) is devoted for one histone modification marker (H3K4me2, H3K27me2). The treated cells are further processed by chromatin-immuoprecipitation followed by next generation Sequencing (ChIP-Seq). Results: Data analysis was performed to identify enriched affected pathways. Significant differences in gene expression between high levels of glucose versus normal glucose were found using ChIP-Seq and confirming what was previously obtained by ChIP on Chip. Conclusion: The results of this experiment shed some light on the matter of surrounding environment effect on gene expression. Evidence of environmental elements affecting blood glucose levels was seen predecting difference in gene expression, e.g. type II diabetes risk factors. Genes involved in several pathways showing evidence of cardiac muscle diseases, kidney damage and changes in the calcium channel signaling were observed, all of which are related to type II diabetes complications.