Endocrine Abstracts

A major challenge in physiology and pathology is an understanding of the link between the function of a cell population within its tissue environment and its interactions with other organs. The pituitary gland, regulating a diverse range of essential physiological functions, exemplifies this challenge: stimulation from the brain is relayed as variable hormone pulses (the hypothalamic–pituitary (HP) system), which are decoded by peripheral organs into diff...

The pituitary gland generates highly ordered hormone pulses to control basic body functions such as growth, fertility, and lactation. Using an approach combining transgenic mice models with cell-specific fluorescent tags (GH-GFP, PRL-DsRed, POMC-GFP, LH-Cerulean…) and functional optical imaging (pituitary-scale 2-photon excitation microscopy, cellular in vivo imaging), we recently unveiled that most, if not all pituitary cell types are much more organized than we ...

A current challenge in physiology/pathology is translating cell-transduction processes identified in vitro into the living organism, especially where cell-cell interaction and dynamics have key functional roles. The pituitary gland, regulating a diverse range of essential physiological functions, exemplifies this challenge: stimulation from the brain is relayed as variable hormone pulses (the hypothalamic-pituitary (HP) system), which are decoded by peripheral organs ...

Hypothyroidism refers to a thyroid hormone (TH) deficiency which mainly affects women (10/1 ratio). The higher default incidence in women remains unexplained. Diagnosis of hypothyroidism is based on a single thyroid-stimulating-hormone (TSH) measurement albeit TSH secretion displays pulsatile patterns which are under the positive control of hypothalamic thyrotropin-releasing-hormone (TRH) and negative feedback exerted by THs. Pituitary thyrotrophs form the smallest (2-4%) pitu...