Endocrine Abstracts

Signalling through intracellular pathways is typically monitored by recording the change in abundance of a signalling component of interest in a whole cell population – often using western blotting. However, single cells differ markedly in their response to a given stimuli, even in a clonal cell line. High content imaging enables signalling responses to be quantified in space and time – in single cells – by the semi-automated imaging of many tens of hundreds of ...

Highly regulated pulsatile secretion of the GnRH is essential for reproduction. GnRH pulses act via 7TM receptors to control synthesis and secretion of FSH and LH. GnRH receptors activate a signal-transduction network that includes two parallel pathways mediated by ERK and nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT). ERK and NFAT in concert with other effectors mediate transcriptional regulation of FSHβ and LHβ genes following stimulation by pulsatil...

Single cell measurements of signalling proteins typically reveal high cell–cell variability raising questions about how reliably individual cells sense their environment in order to make decisions. Information theoretic approaches can be used to explore such sensing, treating cell signalling pathways as ‘noisy’ communication channels. Mutual information (MI) can be calculated between system inputs and outputs as a statistical measure of the reliability of sensin...

One way in which cells receive information about their environment is through hormones binding to appropriate receptors on their cell surface. Single cell measurements of signalling proteins typically reveal high cell–cell variability raising questions about how reliably individual cells sense their environment in order to make decisions. Information theoretic approaches can be used to explore such sensing, treating cell signalling pathways as ‘noisy’ communicat...