Endocrine Abstracts

Many adult organs harbor stem cells that are used to sustain homeostasis and to replenish damaged tissue following injury or disease. While the therapeutic potential of stem cells has been much discussed its practical use is still lacking. One major obstacle is the difficulty of re-introducing stem cells into their organs.Adult stem cells reside within a special environment (niche), which participates in every aspect of stem cell behavior. Many of the bi...

Tissue-specific progenitors play essential roles for organ development and homeostasis but they are not present in all tissues. Throughout life, the pituitary gland adapts the proportion of its endocrine cell types to meet hormonal demands. This plasticity may rely on adult progenitor cells and we have recently described such a population. These cells express SOX2, an HMG box transcription factor, marker of several embryonic progenitors and stem cells, and form ‘pituisphe...

There is some evidence from different studies that (1) stem cells reside in thyroid tissue (as in all other tissues) for life-time of the organism, (2) stem cells and their progeny are under the control of niches that limit proliferation of these undifferentiated cells, (3) induction of apoptosis and (excessive) growth stimulation can overcome strict niche control, (4) under these conditions actively cycling, more or less differentiated progenitor may grow faster than the surr...