Genetic drivers of pancreatic islet function [pancreatic islet]

Study to map diabetes-related traits in the Diversity Outbred (DO) mouse cohort. The DO is an outbred mouse population derived from 8 inbred mouse strains, including 3 wild-derived strains. The DO captures a broad range of genetic variation comparable to that found in human populations (SVENSON et al. 2012), and presents a similarly broad range of individual susceptibility to T2D. We metabolically challenged 500 DO mice with a high-fat/high-sucrose diet, measured a host of diabetes-related physiological phenotypes (e.g., plasma glucose and insulin), and isolated their pancreatic islets for functional and molecular characterization. We performed RNA-seq to determine the genetic architecture of gene expression in islets