Endocrine Abstracts

The pituitary is an anatomically well protected endocrine gland in permanent contact with the central nervous system. Although it was known that pituitary has plasticity in response to the physiological demands of the body, there were few clear data about the post-natal mechanisms in charge of this plasticity. The discovery of a group of cells expressing stem cell markers precisely organized in the outer zone of the adenopituitary open up new possibilities to explain the const...

Proteomics provides an avenue to understand the interaction between the functional pathways within a cell and its environmental milieu, independent of any changes at the RNA level. There are only a few studies in thyroid diseases using proteomics; variability in specimen content in fibrous versus follicular tissue plus the presence of other types of cells (blood, lymphatic) makes difficult to apply global proteomic to surgery pieces; commercial cell-lines of thyroid cancer wer...

Pendred syndrome is an autosomal recessive disorder with congenital-sensorineural deafness and goiter due to mutations in SLC26A4, that encodes a transmembrane protein, Pendrin. In thyrocytes, Pendrin is proposed to act at the apical pole to transport intracellular iodide into the follicular lumen.A Galician Pendred compound heterozygous patient was studied; a c.297delT in exon 3 and a new splicing-mutation c.416-1G<A were found, introducing p...