Study of autoimmune diabetes in mice using non-invasive, longitudinal live imaging in the anterior chamber of the eye

Gaetano Faleo^1,2,3,4,5,6, Midhat H. Abdulreda^1,2,3,4,5,6, R. Damaris Molano^1,2,3,4,5,6, Maite Lopez-Cabezas^1,2,3,4,5,6, Carmen Fotino^1,2,3,4,5,6, Elsie Zahr-Akrawi^1,2,3,4,5,6, Camillo Ricordi^1,2,3,4,5,6, Allison Bayer^1,2,3,4,5,6, Alejandro Caicedo^1,2,3,4,5,6, Per-Olof Berggren^1,2,3,4,5,6, Antonello Pileggi ^1,2,3,4,5,6

¹Diabetes Research Institute, University of Miami, Miami, FL, United States; ²Medicine/Endocrinology, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, FL, United States; ³Medicine, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, FL, United States; ⁴Microbiology and Immunology, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, FL, United States; ⁵Surgery, Microbiology and Immunology, Biomedical Engineering, University of Miami, Miami, FL USA, FL, United States; ⁶Rolf Luft Research Center for Diabetes and Endocrinology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

The islets of Langerhans are endocrine cell clusters that represent ~1% of the pancreatic tissue where they are scattered present and therefore difficult to image noninvasively. Several imaging techniques can be used to study islet biology, including Bioluminiscence, MRI and PET-scan, but lack of cellular resolution.  Fluorescent confocal microscopy can be used to obtain high definition imaging data in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo.  We have previously reported that islet cell physiology and immune rejection can be studied using the anterior chamber of the eye (ACE) in vivo by confocal fluorescent microscopy.  Here we sought to evaluate whether islet autoimmunity could be reproduced in this model to study longitudinally the progression of the autoimmune process.