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 spatial organisation of receptors at the macro and micro-scale is critical for the tight regulation of cell signalling, including signalling activated by the superfamily of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). To study these processes, a range of imaging techniques have been employed including an increasing application of super-resolution microscopy to image receptor activity beyond the diffraction limit of light. In this session, I will highlight the experimental and imag...

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 ...