Sanofi-Aventis View Institution's Website 2 articles published in JoVE Medicine Utilizing Murine Inducible Telomerase Alleles in the Studies of Tissue Degeneration/Regeneration and Cancer Takashi Shingu1, Mariela Jaskelioff2, Liang Yuan1, Zhihu Ding3, Alexei Protopopov4, Maria Kost-Alimova4, Jian Hu1 1Department of Cancer Biology, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, 2Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, 3Sanofi US, 4Institute of Applied Cancer Science, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center Telomere and telomerase play essential roles in ageing and tumorigenesis. The goal of this protocol is to show how to generate two murine inducible telomerase knock-in alleles and how to utilize them in the studies of tissue degeneration/regeneration and cancer. Medicine Improved Protocol For Laser Microdissection Of Human Pancreatic Islets From Surgical Specimens Dorothée Sturm1,2, Lorella Marselli3, Florian Ehehalt1,2, Daniela Richter1, Marius Distler2, Stephan Kersting1,2, Robert Grützmann2, Krister Bokvist4, Philippe Froguel5, Robin Liechti6, Anne Jörns7, Paolo Meda8, Gustavo Bruno Baretton9, Hans-Detlev Saeger2, Anke M. Schulte10, Piero Marchetti3, Michele Solimena1 1Molecular Diabetology, Paul Langerhans Institute Dresden, 2Department of GI-, Thoracic- and Vascular Surgery, University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, University of Technology Dresden, 3Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Metabolic Unit University of Pisa, 4Labs DC0522, Lilly Corporate Center, 5Genomics, Faculty of Medicine Imperial College London, 6Vital-IT, SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, 7Clinical Biochemistry, Hannover Medical School, 8Cell Physiology and Metabolism, Medical School, University of Geneva, 9Department of Pathology, University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, University of Technology Dresden, 10R&D DIAB Division / Translational Medicine, Sanofi-Aventis Laser microdissection is a technique that allows the recovery of selected cells from minute amounts of parenchyma. Here we describe a protocol for acquiring human pancreatic islets from surgical specimens to be used for transcriptomic studies. Our protocol improves the intrinsic autofluorescence of human beta cells, thus facilitating their collection.