José Filipe Melo
Instituto de Anatomia Patológica, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa
Gonçalo Borrecho
Center for Interdisciplinary Research Egas Moniz (CiiEM), Monte da Caparinca
Noelia Martinez-Sánchez
Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, University of Oxford
Francisco Tortosa
Instituto de Anatomia Patológica, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa;
Center for Interdisciplinary Research Egas Moniz (CiiEM), Monte da Caparinca
The anterior pituitary gland regulates growth, metabolism, and reproduction by secreting hormones. Folliculo-stellate cells (FSC) are non-endocrine cells located among hormone-producing cells in the anterior pituitary glands, but little is known about the exact roles of those cells. Although, with their net organization, they seem to have an important role in the hormonal cells regulation and maintenance. In this work, the first ever made in this area, 33 pituitaries of three groups of mice (18 wild type [WT], 11 genetically obese [OB] and 4 under a high fat diet [HFD]) were studied in order to determine if there was any relation between the number of FSC and alterations of the basal metabolism in each group of mice. For that, immunohistochemical staining using the S-100 protein was used and also the Image-J software, to calculate the percentage of FSC present in each sample. The authors found that, although there wasn’t any significant difference between WT and OB mice, the group of HFD mice tend to have substantially higher percentage of FSC than the mice from other groups. This might suggest some yet unknown link between diet, precisely with a high-fat diet, and the presentation of FSC in the anterior pituitary.
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