Endocrine Abstracts

Perturbation of thyroid hormone (TH) function during prenatal brain development can cause a spectrum of neurological disorders as evident in pediatric patients with untreated congenital hypothyroidism or patients with mutations in THRA and SLC16A2 genes. However, scarcity and inaccessibility of human brain tissue from early developmental stages has been a major roadblock for experimental approaches to decipher local TH action in early development. Advanced <e...

Thyroid hormones (TH) play a fundamental role in brain development. Changes on TH availability during pregnancy and early childhood can lead to neurological disorders. Accordingly, concerns are mounting that exposure to environmental compounds capable of interfering with TH action can disrupt neuronal development. Current approaches to categorize chemicals as thyroid hormone system disrupting chemicals (THSDC) are mainly based on determination of changes in circulating TH conc...

Thyroid hormones (TH) play a critical role during nervous system development and patients carrying coding variants of THRA or SLC16A2/MCT8 genes present a spectrum of neurological phenotypes presumably resulting from perturbed local TH action during early brain development. Monocarboxylate transporter MCT8 is a well-characterized TH membrane transporter and MCT8 mutations have been associated with the Allan-Herndon-Dudley Syndrome. Recent advances in stem cel...

Recently, human cerebral organoids (hCOs) emerged as powerful three-dimensional in vitro models recapitulating key aspects of early human cerebral cortex development. Improved protocols for hCO generation from induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) paved the way for new disease modeling approaches and enable multimodal analyses of perturbed neurogenesis resulting from manipulation of signaling pathways or gene function. These prospects prompted us to adopt this techno...

During the last decade induced overexpression of defined transcription factors has been shown to have a driving effect on the differentiation of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) into many specific cell types. Nevertheless, the generation of protocols promoting a coordinate self-assembly of differentiated cells into distinct morphological units with also functional properties reminiscent of organs and tissues in vivo are still very sparse. Recently, we have reported the gen...