pancreatic islet glut2 glucose transporter mrna and protein expression in humans with and without niddm glut2 glucose transporter mrna has been shown to be underexpressed in pancreatic islets of numerous animal models of noninsulindependent diabetes mellitus niddm it has been proposed that this molecular defect contributes to the pathogenesis of diabetes although information concerning the expression of glut2 in human pancreatic islet tissue is lacking in contrast to the high abundance of glut2 in rat islets human islets were found to express distinctly low levels of this glucose transporter mrna and protein thus a sensitive competitive reverse transcriptionpolymerase chain reaction assay was developed to quantify human glut2 mrna we obtained pancreases from 4 human organ donors with previously diagnosed niddm and 11 nondiabetic donors and found no significant differences in glut2 mrna between the two groups glut2 mrna was 024 008 amolmicrograms rna mean se in pancreases from humans with diabetes and 027 006 amolmicrogram rna in those without this diagnosis similarly human pancreatic islet glut2 protein was measured by immunoblot and found to be present at similar levels in two individuals with diabetes relative to six control samples these results thus demonstrate the existence of species differences in the abundance of islet glut2 mrna and protein furthermore the analysis of islet glut2 in a small sample of human organ donors with and without diabetes raises the possibility that decreased betacell glut2 may not represent a widespread feature of humans with niddm