Nod scid

The Stanford University Administrative Panel on Laboratory Animal Care (APLAC) approved all animal protocols. We performed all experiments in compliance with the institutional guidelines of Stanford University. We purchased C57BL/6 mice from US National Institute of Aging. We generated mice ubiquitously expressing a green fluorescent protein (GFP) transgene, mice ubiquitously expressing a firefly luciferase (Fluc) transgene driven by the ACTB promoter (L2G85 strain), and mice expressing nLacZ under regulation of the Myf5 promoter (Myf5^nLacZ/+)^{43 (link)} as described previously^{23 (link)}. We generated double transgenic GFP/Luciferase and Myf5^nLacZ/+/Luciferase mice by breeding the above strains. We validated these genotypes by appropriate PCR-based strategies. We used cells from C57BL/6 mice for cell proliferation, phosphoprotein analysis, gene expression and syngeneic transplant experiments. We used cells from GFP/Luciferase and Myf5^nLacZ/+/Luciferase mice for allogenic transplantation experiments into NOD/SCID (Jackson Laboratory) recipient mice. We studied young mice at 2–4 months of age (median 2 months) and aged mice at 22–28 months of age (median 24 months) for all strains and genders. All mice used in these studies were females, except as noted in Supplementary Fig. 1d.

Islet RNA was prepared from 6–7-week-old female C57BL/6J, NOD, NOD.scid, and NOD.Rag mice and male NOD mice (The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME), and cDNA was prepared for quantitative RT-PCR (RT-qPCR) analyses as previously described (3 (link)). Primers were based on mouse sequences for iPLA₂β and internal control 18S (gene IDs 53357 and 19791, respectively).