Open AccessInsulin modulates the frequency of Ca2+ oscillations in mouse pancreatic islets
Author(s) -
Boah Lee,
Taegeun Song,
Kayoung Lee,
Jaeyoon Kim,
Per Olof Berggren,
Sung Ho Ryu,
Junghyo Jo
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0183569
Subject(s) - insulin oscillation , insulin , islet , medicine , endocrinology , pancreatic islets , oscillation (cell signaling) , biology , biochemistry
Pancreatic islets can adapt to oscillatory glucose to produce synchronous insulin pulses. Can islets adapt to other oscillatory stimuli, specifically insulin? To answer this question, we stimulated islets with pulses of exogenous insulin and measured their Ca 2+ oscillations. We observed that sufficiently high insulin (> 500 nM) with an optimal pulse period (~ 4 min) could make islets to produce synchronous Ca 2+ oscillations. Glucose and insulin, which are key stimulatory factors of islets, modulate islet Ca 2+ oscillations differently. Glucose increases the active-to-silent ratio of phases, whereas insulin increases the period of the oscillation. To examine the dual modulation, we adopted a phase oscillator model that incorporated the phase and frequency modulations. This mathematical model showed that out-of-phase oscillations of glucose and insulin were more effective at synchronizing islet Ca 2+ oscillations than in-phase stimuli. This finding suggests that a phase shift in glucose and insulin oscillations can enhance inter-islet synchronization.