Endocrine Abstracts

GnRH is secreted in pulses and its effects on pituitary gonadotropes depend on pulse frequency. This is crucial for physiological control and therapeutic manipulation of the system (in IVF and treatment of hormone-dependent cancers) but GnRH pulse frequency decoding mechanisms are unknown. The simplest form of frequency dependence is a linear relationship between integrated inputs and outputs but such ‘integrative tracking’ cannot explain the bell-shaped frequency-re...

GnRH acts via Gq/11-coupled GPCRs on gonadotropes to control synthesis and secretion of LH and FSH. We use mathematical and statistical approaches as well as automated cell imaging to explore this system. In cells expressing ERK2–GFP and GnRH receptors, GnRH pulses cause rapid and transient nuclear translocation of ERK2–GFP, providing a live-cell readout for ERK activation1. A mathematical model trained against this data predicted greater sensitivity to re...