Of other significantly induced genes on the list, we focused our attention on thioredoxin-interacting protein, TXNIP. TXNIP was first described as a binding partner of thioredoxin that regulates its antioxidant functions (Nishiyama et al., 1999; Patwari et al., 2006; Yamanaka et al., 2000). As TXNIP had been implicated in glucotoxicity-induced apoptosis of β-cells (Chen et al., 2008; Shalev, 2008), we reasoned that it may also mediate programmed cell death in response to ER stress; therefore we embarked on experiments to investigate the underlying mechanisms and physiology of this putative link.
