Endocrine Abstracts

Background : Patients with primary adrenal insufficiency (PAI) describe significant impairments in quality of life. Current replacement regimes are non-physiological. Animal studies indicate that pulsatile presentation of endogenous glucocorticoids is critical for normal transcriptional and behavioural responses. Healthy volunteer work also shows that pattern of glucocorticoid presentation alters cognitive and emotional processing.Objective: To assess th...

Introduction: Germline mutations in the aryl hydrocarbon receptor interacting protein (AIP) gene predispose to growth hormone (GH, 90% of patients) or prolactin (PRL)-secreting tumours, with negligible number of patients with other pituitary tumour types. Animal models of acromegaly are scarce and Aip models have controversial data. Therefore we have generated two pituitary-specific Aip knockout mouse models to study the consequences of loss of AIP p...

Epidermal growth factor (EGF) and heregulin (HRG) act via ErbB receptors, to stimulate Akt and ERK. These drive breast cancer cell proliferation and the network is targeted in cancer therapy (1). Single cell responses show marked cell-cell variation and information theory provides statistical measures that take the effect this noise has on information transfer into account (2). Here we quantify the mutual information (MI) between stimulus concentration and effects in MCF7 cell...

Introduction: The gut hormone peptide YY 3-36 (PYY3-36) is secreted postprandially from intestinal L-cells to signal satiety. Peripheral administration of PYY3-36 suppresses food intake in rodents and humans. PYY3-36-based drugs are therefore promising anti-obesity treatments. It has been proposed that circulating PYY3-36 supresses appetite via the Y2 receptor (Y2R) in the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus (ARC). The vagus nerve, the majo...

Efnb2 encodes for the ligand Ephrinb2 that binds to its cognate Eph receptor, with which plays an integral role in angiogenesis, stem cell regulation and tumorigenesis. Using a pituitary-specific Cre-driver (Hesx1Cre), we conditionally deleted Efnb2 from the early stem/progenitor cells (PSCs) of the developing pituitary gland. We found that Efnb2 is expressed in PSCs both during embryogenesis and adulthood, suggesting its...

Background: Diabetes insipidus (DI) is a recognised complication of pituitary surgery, with current diagnosis requiring clinical observation aided by plasma and urine electrolytes and osmolalities. Copeptin, a 39 amino acid glycopeptide secreted in equimolar quantities to ADH, is a stable surrogate marker of ADH release and has potential to facilitate prompt diagnosis of post-operative DI. This assay has been shown to accurately predict which patients are likely to develop DI ...