Role of Pax4/Pax6 in pancreatic β-cell differentiation and maintaining its function

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Pax4 is well known to play some important role in pancreas development. In our study, we showed that Pax4 overexpression induces differentiation from precursor cells to insulin-producing cells. Various β-cell-specific factors including GLUT2 were also induced by Pax4 overexpression, indicating that Pax4 facilitates p-cell differentiation. In addition, we showed that Pax4 functions as a transcriptional repressor and found several candidate molecules which binds to Pax4 and could function as a co-repressor of Pax4.Also, we found that Pax6 plays some important role in maintaining β-cell function; we showed that in Pax6 (+/-) mice glucose-stimulated insulin secretion was impaired, although there was no difference in pancreas morphology and insulin content. These results indicate that Pax6 plays some important role in glucose-stimulated insulin secretion.