After the onset of type 2 diabetes, chronic hyperglycemia causes glucotoxic changes in many tissues (1, 2). Glucose toxicity in the pancreatic islet beta cell secondarily leads to further defects in beta cell function, including decreases in insulin reporter activity, gene expression, content, and secretion (3). Antioxidants have been shown to prevent these adverse changes in experimental models (4, 5). We previously observed that loss of insulin gene expression is accompanied by decreased binding to the promoter region of two important transcription factors, PDX-1 1 (STF-1, IDX-1, IPF-1) and RIPE-3b1 activator (6 -8). PDX-1 is required for pancreatic development and is a key regulator of insulin gene expression. Mutations within the RIPE-3b1/C1 element of the insulin promoter markedly reduce glucose-responsive insulin gene expression (7). We also reported that loss of RIPE-3b1 binding precedes the loss of PDX-1 binding to the insulin promoter as glucotoxicity develops (8). The chronology of these losses is likely to be important in light of a recent report that RIPE-3b1/MafA directly activates PDX-1 transcription (9).The work in this study features the use of HIT-T15 cells, a glucose-responsive beta cell line that has proven over the past decade to reproduce the molecular changes in gene expression that are caused by glucose toxicity in vivo in animal models. Since isolated islets cannot be chronically cultured to study the adverse effects of high glucose concentrations over many months, this cell line is a valuable surrogate. In our previous work, reconstitution of late passage glucotoxic HIT-T15 cells by transient transfection with PDX-1 partially restored insulin promoter activity (8). Since RIPE-3b1 had not yet been cloned, we were unable to extend our studies with this transcription factor but hypothesized that reconstitution of the cells with both PDX-1 and RIPE-3b1 activator would lead to greater recovery of insulin promoter activity. With the recent cloning and identification of RIPE-3b1 activator as MafA (10 -12), we have been able to perform new studies to examine 1) whether levels of MafA mRNA and protein are decreased in glucotoxic beta cells; 2) the mechanism of MafA protein degradation; 3) whether the antioxidant, N-acetylcysteine, can prevent glucotoxicity-induced loss of MafA protein and binding to the insulin promoter; and 4) whether overexpression of MafA and PDX-1 together can restore insulin promoter activity and mRNA levels more fully than PDX-1 alone.
MATERIALS AND METHODSCell Culture-HIT-T15 cells were maintained in RPMI 1640 media containing 10% fetal bovine serum and 11.1 mM glucose as described previously (13). Cells were categorized as early passage (p71-75) or late passage (p123-128), with each passage occurring weekly. Chronic culturing of HIT-T15 cells with N-acetyl-L-cysteine (Sigma; 0.5, 1, or 5 mM) added to the media was begun at p70.