Talk:Beta cell

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 3 September 2020 and 14 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Dinahcann.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:58, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2018 and 14 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): NickBWhit.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 15:38, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Untitled
Sorry to Anon for the pluralization mistake. --mav

adding...
I would like to add to this category - beta cells. The page is protected. Please contact me at jp dot cartailler dot com

Beta-cell
Beta-cell claims "Beta-cell is the correct spelling for beta cell. Also commonly spelled β-cell." Thinking about mergin them.--E-Bod 03:29, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Someone did merge ? Beta-cell now redirects here to 'beta cell'. - Rod57 (talk) 19:15, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Differentiation of beta-like cells
[http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/a-new-use-for-love-handles-insulin-producing-beta-cells/81252612/ A New Use for Love Handles, Insulin-Producing Beta Cells. April 2016] has interesting graph of the development of beta-like cells from pluripotent cells. Could mention here ? - Rod57 (talk) 19:13, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Would like to add...
Could add a history section, section on beta cell failure/pathogenesis, more citations in the function section, add figure(s) regarding the insulin excitation-secretion pathway, expand on clinical significance, remove or move experimental induction of diabetes to research section, find as many citations as possible for type I diabetes research section and create type II research heading. NickBWhit (talk) 00:03, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Evaluation of current article
Here is my review of the state of the the article. I will making some changes over the next couple weeks and all feedback is welcome.

Lead Section The lead section definitely needs improvement. It is way too brief and doesn’t even say that their function is to synthesis and secrete insulin. “Pancreatic islets of the pancreas” also needs to be reworded. The percentage of the islet they make up is not cited so I will find a source for this. I could also mention what goes wrong with them in type I and type II diabetes. Once I add the sections I think the article needs, I will write the lead section to briefly cover them all.

Structure I would like to add more sections since there are only three. Maybe a history section describing when they were found and any big discoveries about them. I will add a section about type II diabetes under the research heading. I also plan to create subheadings under clinical significance about type I and type II diabetes, islet cell carcinoma, and insulinoma since I plan to expand upon this info and current treatments. Another subheading can be added with classes of drugs that act on the beta-cell such as sulfonylureas. I would also like to break up the “function” heading into at least two sections. First is “glucose stimulated insulin secretion”, which is the common term for their triggering pathway, and secondly “insulin synthesis” since this is their other primary function and it is a complicated process itself. There is also a sentence about experimentally inducing diabetes which needs to be moved to the research section.

Balanced Coverage Whoever edited the research section only researched type I diabetes so type II needs a section. The type one section has a good definition of T1D which I will move up to clinical significance after adding citations. There is also only research on stem cell regeneration so I would like to add at least one other area of T1D research. This is unbalanced since it is clear one researcher wrote the whole section. Other than that, functions and other biological info about the secretion pathway need to mention only the field’s overall consensus. There are plenty of review articles I can cite here including an image of the “consensus model”.

Reliable Sources Many more citations need to be found, specifically in the function section since everything here needs to be cited but there are only three citations. The research section has many uncited claims about type I diabetes. In fact, the only citation is at the end referencing a news article about most likely about their drug. I would like to add some citations of their work instead of a news article. Clinical data would be helpful in the clinical significance section also. Other than that, the citations are all from reputable journals and seem to reference what they are talking about in the article.

Initial evaluation There is much to be done to improve this article. The material is not organized well. I will be adding numerous subheadings to help with organization. Along with this I will move some paragraphs to the research section and others out of it as stated above. Since it is such a short article, the content is well focused and I don’t believe much of it will need to be removed. It is easy enough to understand but I will add a figure in the function section to help people understand it better. The article is definitely not comprehensive; lacking in insulin production, T2D research, and pathogenesis sections. These whole topics are not even covered so I will be adding quite a bit. My plans for these sections are seen above. The quality of evidence and citations are not bad for the ones that are included. The only one that needs to be changed is the news article which I would like to switch to a scientific journal article. All the other journals are reputable. However, there are large sections of uncited text in the functions and research sections. Almost every sentence here needs a citation added which I will be doing. There are not necessarily assumptions made since the statements are true, but it all came from someone’s knowledge. As of now, the evidence for these claims is not there. The article’s info box is good and I do like the picture included. There are appendixes “see also” and “anatomy of the endocrine system” sections but no footnotes. I don’t think these need to be changed but I will be adding “islets of Langerhans” to the see also section. Overall the coverage is neutral but this isn’t a controversial topic. I would just like to add some other sections to better tell the whole story. Adding the sections mentioned will improve the content of the article, and citations will greater legitimize and emphasize the facts.

NickBWhit (talk) 00:08, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Edit Summary
Working from the top of the article down, I started with the lead section. I reworded and lengthened it while adding a brief summary on the function and diabetic pathogenesis of beta cells. I also corrected a statistic regarding mice to a more relevant human statistic and found a citation for it.

Moving to the function section, I created insulin synthesis and secretion subheadings for clarity and to emphasize the two main roles of the cells. I moved the first paragraph that was in function above these two subheadings, as it acted alone as a good introduction to overall function. I also added a whole paragraph to insulin release as an intro/overview before entering into more detail. I fixed various typos and added a few extra facts along with 7 new citations. This was initially a very under cited section. Moving on to insulin production, I added this whole section and citations since it is a very important function independent of secretion. I think it helped to highlight some beta-cell organelles also. Next I added a diagram of the secretion mechanism as a visual way to understand it. I included proper attributes and copyright info.

Next, in the clinical section I made T1D, T2D, insulinoma, and medications subsections for better organization and to add more info on how each relates to the beta cell. I moved a paragraph from the research section defining T1D to the clinical section since it seemed misplaced and redundant. I then found and added 3 citations to it since there were none, although the information was correct. In the T2D section I deleted an incorrect fact about sugar consumption causing diabetes, edited the current info to read better, and added some pathogenesis as it related to the beta cell. Next I researched and added a citation to the existing insulinoma section. Finally in this clinical section, I added a medications subsection since some diabetes medications act directly on the beta cell along with a couple citations.

In the research section, I started by moving a sentence about experimental induction of diabetes from the clinical to research section since the chemicals are used in mice. I also deleted an opinion based sentence that stated the best way to treat T1D is through stem cell therapy and removed another unreputable citation with its associated sentence. The whole T1D research section had no citations so I found a few and added them, verified the sentences were true, and then removed the "unreferenced maintenance template" box that was added by another wiki member previously. Then I added an experimental techniques section to go over some common ways data is collected from beta cells. Finally in this section, I added a T2D section reviewing some of the most researched topics in the field accompanied by 4 citations.

Cleaning up at the end I added "Islets of Langerhans" to the "see also" section. I then went through and added some in-text word links to other wikipedia articles. In total, I added 22 new references and had to re-edit some that had incorrectly formatted dates.

NickBWhit (talk) 10:50, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Type Two diabetes
This article says that Type Two diabetes is caused primarily by genetic factors. Forgive me if I am wrong, but I thought Type Two diabetes was caused by being overweight. Vorbee (talk) 12:59, 26 June 2019 (UTC)
 * My understanding is that both genetic and lifestyle factors are important in the development of Type 2 Diabetes, maybe the article should reflect the importance of both--Narvikvaren (talk) 19:46, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Structure of Beta Cells
What is the structure of a beta cell. Thanks. 67.162.29.235 (talk) 22:33, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Adv Molecular Bio Bass-FSU-Fa23
— Assignment last updated by Hcs22e (talk) 22:40, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Improving article as a wiki education assignment
I will be making some edits to improve this article. I will be focusing in the introduction and function part. I re phrase it, add an image from my authorship and added new citations for parts that were missing. Scienceporium (talk) 00:45, 14 November 2023 (UTC)