The discovery of a very common silent polymorphism at codon 130 of GLUT 4 allowed examination of the association of this locus with Type 2 diabetes using allele-specific oligonucleotide hybridisation in a subset of the Welsh subjects.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
All 11 exons of the GLUT4 gene from 30 British white subjects with NIDDM were amplified using the polymerase chain reaction and screened for nucleotide sequence variation using the single-stranded conformation polymorphism (SSCP) method.
Therefore, one missense mutation (Thr831-->Ala831) in the insulin receptor, as found in three patients, is possibly involved in the etiology of a subset of the 51 NIDDM patients.
Because the glycogen-associated regulatory subunit of protein phosphatase 1 (PP1 G-subunit) plays a key role in the insulin stimulation of glycogen synthesis and the activity of PP1 is decreased in insulin-resistant subjects, we have now cloned the human G-subunit cDNA to search for abnormalities in the corresponding gene (designated PPP1R3 in the human genome nomenclature) in patients with NIDDM.
Analysis of the phenotypes showed that patients with NIDDM who had IRS-1 variants did not differ in their degree of insulin resistance compared with patients without known IRS-1 polymorphisms.
During the course of our search for susceptibility genes contributing to the more common late-onset NIDDM forms, we observed nominal evidence for linkage between NIDDM and markers in the region of the HNF-4alpha/MODY1 locus in a subset of French families with NIDDM diagnosed before 45 yr of age.
Mutational analysis of all the 39 SUR1 exons, including intron-exon boundaries, in 63 NIDDM patients revealed two missense variants, five silent variants in the coding region, and four intron variants.
Furthermore, S1043Y and C1095Y are not common IRS-1 polymorphisms as they were detected only in 1/136 choromosomes from NIDDM patients (allele frequency in NIDDM patients = 0.0007) and in 0/120 chromosomes from control subjects.
The most prevalent IRS-1 variant, a Gly-->Arg change at the codon 972, has been reported to be increased in prevalence among patients with type 2 diabetes.
Our findings suggest that deficient binding of NEUROD1 or binding of a transcriptionally inactive NEUROD1 polypeptide to target promoters in pancreatic islets leads to the development of type 2 diabetes in humans.