BACKGROUND Insulin like growth factors (IGFs) and their binding proteins (IGFBPs) are secreted peptides that play major roles in regulating the normal development and maturation of mammary gland. While Igfbp7 has been shown to decrease breast tumor growth, its role in regulating the normal mammary gland development has not been studied. To this end, we generated Igfbp7-null mice and examined th...

The identification of mammary gland regions is a necessary processing step during the anatomical structure recognition of human body and can be expected to provide useful information for breast tumor diagnosis. This paper proposes a fully automated scheme for segmenting the mammary gland regions in non-contrast torso CT images. This scheme calculates the probability of each voxel belonging to t...

Macrophages are important regulators of branching morphogenesis during development and postnatally in the mammary gland. Regulation of macrophage dynamics during these processes can therefore have a profound impact on development. We demonstrate here that the developing mammary gland expresses high levels of inflammatory CC-chemokines, which are essential in vivo regulators of macrophage migrat...

The development of in vitro culture systems quantitatively and qualitatively recapitulating normal breast biology is key to the understanding of mammary gland biology. Current three-dimensional mammary culture systems have not demonstrated concurrent proliferation and functional differentiation ex vivo in any system for longer than 2 weeks. Here, we identify conditions including Neuregulin1 and...

Cultured BALB/c mouse mammary gland epithelial cells of varying oncogenic potential in vivo have been examined for their ability to multinucleate in the presence of cytochalasin B (CB). Highly tumorigenic cell lines derived from mammary tumors with hormonal, viral, or chemical carcinogen etiologies were extensively multinucleated when cultured in CB-supplemented medium. Normal mammary gland cel...

A transplanted mammary fibroadenoma was found to grow in 95 per cent of intact adult female rats and the increment of tumor weights was progressive and logarithmic. The growth of the tumor was retarded by ovariectomy and still more when this was combined with adrenalectomy. In ovariectomized rats the growth of the tumor was stimulated by phenolic estrogens, this increase being enhanced when pro...

A conditional null mutation of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-binding protein (PBP) gene was generated to understand its role in mammary gland development. PBP-deficient mammary glands exhibited retarded ductal elongation during puberty, and decreased alveolar density during pregnancy and lactation. PBP-deficient mammary glands could not produce milk to nurse pups during lactation. ...

The development and functional cycle of the mammary gland involves a number of processes that are caricatured by breast cancer cells during invasion and metastasis. Expression of the hypoxia-inducible transcription factors HIF-1 and HIF-2 has been associated with metastatic, poor prognosis, and high-grade breast cancers. Since hypoxia affects normal epithelial differentiation, we hypothesise th...

The development and functional cycle of the mammary gland involves a number of processes that are caricatured by breast cancer cells during invasion and metastasis. Expression of the hypoxia-inducible transcription factors HIF-1 and HIF-2 has been associated with metastatic, poor prognosis, and high-grade breast cancers. Since hypoxia affects normal epithelial differentiation, we hypothesise th...

Urokinase-type plasminogen activator expression is induced in the mouse mammary gland during development and post-lactational involution. We now show that primiparous plasminogen-deficient (Plg(-/-)) mice have seriously compromised mammary gland development and involution. All mammary glands were underdeveloped and one-quarter of the mice failed to lactate. Although the glands from lactating Pl...