Glucose and NAADP trigger elementary intracellular β-cell Ca²⁺signals

Abstract

Pancreatic β-cells release insulin upon a rise in blood glucose. The precise mechanisms of stimulus-secretion coupling, and its failure in Diabetes Mellitus Type 2, remain to be elucidated. The consensus model, as well as a class of currently prescribed anti-diabetic drugs, are based around the observation that glucose-evoked ATP production in β-cells leads to closure of cell membrane ATP-gated potassium (KATP) channels, plasma membrane depolarisation, Ca2+ influx, and finally the exocytosis of insulin granules (Ashcroft et al., 1984; Cook and Hales, 1984). However, it has been demonstrated by the inactivation of this pathway using genetic and pharmacological means that closure of the KATP channel alone may not be sufficient to explain all β-cell responses to glucose elevation (Henquin, 1998; Seghers et al., 2000). Here we show using total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy (Axelrod, 1981) that glucose as well as the Ca2+ mobilising messenger nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NAADP), known to operate in β-cells (Johnson and Misler, 2002; Masgrau et al., 2003), lead to highly localised elementary intracellular Ca2+ signals. These were found to be obscured by measurements of global Ca2+ signals and the action of powerful SERCA-based sequestration mechanisms at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). This is the first demonstration of elemental Ca2+ signals in response to NAADP, although they have been suspected (Davis et al., 2020). Optical quantal analysis of these events reveals a unitary event amplitude equivalent to that of known elementary Ca2+ signalling events, inositol trisphosphate (IP3) receptor mediated blips (Parker et al., 1996; Parker and Ivorra, 1990), and ryanodine receptor mediated sparks (Cheng et al., 1993). We propose that a mechanism based on these highly localised intracellular Ca2+ signalling events mediated by NAADP may initially operate in β-cells when they respond to elevations in blood glucose.