Morphometric studies on the juxta-insular and tele-insular acinar cells of Original Paper Vet

In the present study on the exocrine pancreas, stereological techniques were applied at the level of electron microscopy to confirm morphological differences between juxta-insular and tele-insular acinar cells of normal rats and to evaluate the effect of B cell secretion on these differences in streptozotocin-diabetic rats. As no similar data have been previously published, we conducted a systematic sampling analysis with special reference to the acinar cell volume, the granule content and the nuclear size. In the normal rats, the juxta-insular acinar cell had an average volume of 918 fan3 and contained 420 zymogen granules which occupied 10.2 % of the cell. In tele-insular acini, the average cell volume was estimated at 755 fan3 and the cell contained 231 zymogen granules which amounted to 6.8 % of the cell. The juxta-insular acinar cell was 18% larger in size and contained 45 % more zymogen granules, but no difference was observed in the size of zymogen granules. In addition, the numerical density of cell nuclei was slightly larger in the tele-insular acini in spite of the similarity in the volume density and diameter of the nuclei in the cells of the two areas. In the streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats, no differences were observed in the cell volume and the zymogen granule content between the juxta- and tele-insular acini. These data suggest that the morphological inhomogeneity in the pancreatic acini is caused b