Proapoptotic bax is hyperexpressed in isolated human islets compared with antiapoptotic bcl-21
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Apoptosis is a well-documented pathway for islet cell death. One potential mechanism is overexpression of death-promoting Bax compared with antiapoptotic Bcl-2 in islets. METHODS: We isolated islets from 10 human pancreata and measured the expression of Bax mRNA and Bcl-2 mRNA by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction; islet and pancreas expression of Bax, Bcl-2, activated caspase-3, and cleaved poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase were also assessed by immunohistochemistry. Islet cell apoptosis was evaluated by terminal deoxynucleotide transferase-mediated dUTP nick-end labeling (TUNEL) assay and by flow cytometry. RESULTS: The mean (+/-SE) level of Bax mRNA was 336+/-79 copies per nanogram of total RNA, and the level of Bcl-2 mRNA was 36+/-10 (P=0.001). A positive correlation existed between islet expression of Bax mRNA and Bcl-2 mRNA (P=0.001). The islet Bax to Bcl-2 ratio was 10.8+/-1.3 and 1.71+/-0.3 for the spleens (P=0.0001). Bax mRNA (P=0.04), but not Bcl-2 mRNA, was expressed at a higher level in islets compared with spleens. Human islets contained large numbers of cells expressing Bax protein, whereas only infrequent islet cells expressed Bcl-2 protein, activated caspase-3, and poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase. The apoptotic index was 5% by TUNEL assay, and the percentage of apoptotic islet cells was 9.7+/-2.5% by flow cytometry. Sections of human pancreas before islet isolation showed islet staining for Bax but not Bcl-2. CONCLUSIONS: Our finding that isolated human islets express Bax at a higher level compared with Bcl-2 suggests a molecular mechanism for islet cell death by apoptosis. We hypothesize that reducing islet expression of Bax, or regulating its activation, will help preserve islet cell mass after islet transplantation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".