Lentiviral Mediated Production of Transgenic Mice: A Simple and Highly Efficient Method for Direct Study of Founders.

For almost 40 years, pronuclear DNA injection represents the standard method to generate transgenic mice with random integration of transgenes. Such a routine procedure is widely utilized throughout the world and its main limitation resides in the poor efficacy of transgene integration, resulting in a low yield of founder animals. Only few percent of animals born after implantation of injected fertilized oocytes have integrated the transgene.

Human Pancreatic β Cell lncRNAs Control Cell-Specific Regulatory Networks.

Recent studies have uncovered thousands of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in human pancreatic β cells. β cell lncRNAs are often cell type specific and exhibit dynamic regulation during differentiation or upon changing glucose concentrations. Although these features hint at a role of lncRNAs in β cell gene regulation and diabetes, the function of β cell lncRNAs remains largely unknown.

Human β cell transcriptome analysis uncovers lncRNAs that are tissue-specific, dynamically regulated, and abnormally expressed in type 2 diabetes.

A significant portion of the genome is transcribed as long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), several of which are known to control gene expression. The repertoire and regulation of lncRNAs in disease-relevant tissues, however, has not been systematically explored. We report a comprehensive strand-specific transcriptome map of human pancreatic islets and β cells, and uncover >1100 intergenic and antisense islet-cell lncRNA genes.