Glucose upregulates a limited number of genes in human beta cells.

Although a large set of data is available concerning organogenesis in animal models, information remains scarce on human organogenesis. In this work, we performed temporal mapping of human fetal pancreatic organogenesis using cell surface markers. We demonstrate that in the human fetal pancreas at 7 weeks of development, the glycoprotein 2 (GP2) marks a multipotent cell population that will differentiate either into the acinar, ductal and endocrine lineages. Development towards the acinar lineage is paralleled by a substantial increase in GP2 expression. Conversely, a subset of the multipotent GP2+ population undergoes endocrine differentiation by down-regulating GP2 and CD142 and turning on NEUROG3, an early marker of endocrine differentiation. Endocrine maturation will progress by up-regulating SUSD2 and lowering ECAD levels. Finally, we show that in vitro differentiation of pancreatic endocrine cells derived from human pluripotent stem cells mimics key in vivo events. Our work constitutes a powerful approach to more precisely define intermediate cell population during conversion of multipotent progenitors into the 3 main human pancreatic cell types (acinar, ductal and endocrine) in vivo. As such, the data pave the way to extend our understanding of the origin of mature human pancreatic cell types and how such lineage decisions are regulated.

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