HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT In the early 1930s, it was reported that injections of crude pituitary extracts increased growth rates in growing animals and milk production in lactating animals. Subsequent studies led to purification from pituitary extracts of two peptide hormones—prolactin and “growth hormone” or somatotropin—which are important to growth and lactation. Prolactin has many functions ra...

Introduction: Estradiol is a neuroactive steroid, which is found in several brain areas such as locus coeruleus (LC). Estradiol modulates nociception by binding to its receptors and also by allosteric interaction with other membranebound receptors like glutamate and GABAA receptors. LC is involved in noradrenergic descending pain modulation. Methods: In order to study the effect of 17β-estra...

The hypothalamic NPY system plays an important role in regulating food intake and energy expenditure. Different biological actions of NPY are assigned to NPY receptor subtypes. Recent studies demonstrated a close relationship between food intake and growth hormone (GH) secretion; however, the mechanism through which endogenous NPY modulates GH release remains unknown. Moreover, conclusive evide...

Information theoretic approaches can be used to quantify information transfer via cell signaling networks. In this study, we do so for gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) activation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) and nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT) in large numbers of individual fixed LβT2 and HeLa cells. Information transfer, measured by mutual information between ...

The aim of the study was to produce sensitive and specifi c polyclonal antibodies against somatotropin (ST) to be used for standardization of an ELISA to measure growth hormone (GH) level in serum and milk of lactating buffaloes. Recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST), kindly donated by NHPP, California, USA was injected both in chicken and rabbit emulsifi ed with Freund’s complete adjuvant fol...

Lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) known as a serum-derived growth factor, is involved in several cell physiological functions in the female reproductive system including: oocyte maturation, in vitro fertilization and embryo implantation by its transmembrane G protein-coupled receptors. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of LPA on in vitro follicular development o...

BACKGROUND A human proteome is relatively dynamic compared with its corresponding genome. Our aim was to study the heterogeneity of a human pituitary proteome as a function of gender, age, and race. METHODS Pituitary control tissues (n = 8) were used to extract proteins; each control tissue was analyzed (n = 3-5) with two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DGE) and PDQuest software. We obtaine...