RESEARCH ARTICLE Proinsulin misfolding is an early event in the progression to type 2 diabetes Anoop Arunagiri1, Leena Haataja1, Anita Pottekat2, Fawnnie Pamenan1, Soohyun Kim3, Lori M Zeltser4, Adrienne W Paton5, James C Paton5, Billy Tsai6, Pamela Itkin-Ansari7, Randal J Kaufman2*, Ming Liu1,8, Peter Arvan1* 1Division of Metabolism, Endocrinology & Diabetes, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, United States; 2Degenerative Diseases Program, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla, United States; 3Department of Biomedical Science and Technology, Konkuk University, Gwangjin-gu, Republic of Korea; 4Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center, Columbia University, New York, United States; 5Research Centre for Infectious Diseases, Department of Molecular and Biomedical Science, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia; 6Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States; 7Development, Aging and Regeneration Program, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla, United States; 8Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China Abstract Biosynthesis of insulin – critical to metabolic homeostasis – begins with folding of the proinsulin precursor, including formation of three evolutionarily conserved intramolecular disulfide bonds. Remarkably, normal pancreatic islets contain a subset of proinsulin molecules bearing at least one free cysteine thiol. In human (or rodent) islets with a perturbed endoplasmic reticulum folding environment, non-native proinsulin enters intermolecular disulfide-linked complexes. In genetically obese mice with otherwise wild-type islets, disulfide-linked complexes of proinsulin are *For correspondence: more abundant, and leptin receptor-deficient mice, the further increase of such complexes tracks
[email protected] (RJK); with the onset of islet insulin deficiency and diabetes.