Gene microarray study corroborates proteomic findings in rodent islet cells

As reported in an issue of Journal of Proteome Research,(1) mass spectrometry has been used to identify numerous proteins in pancreatic islets. Our group studies beta cell gene expression, and we were interested in whether proteins described in this study could be found at the level of the transcriptome. Microarray analysis is a powerful technique for quantitative measurements of the expression of thousand genes in parallel.(2) However, in crude tumor biopsies, only a subset of transcripts correlate with protein levels,(3) and it is still unknown how frequently mRNA expression correlates with amount of protein in well-differentiated cells. To address this issue, we presently compared data from mouse primary islet proteins obtained by proteomic analysis' with RNA data from FACS purified primary rat beta cells obtained by microarray analysis(4,5) (Rasschaert J, Liu D, Cardozo AK, Kutlu B, Eizirik DL, manuscript in preparation).