Laboratorio de Neuroendocrinología Comparada, Departamento de Ecología y Recursos Naturales, Biología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad Universitaria, Ciudad de México, Mexico.
Department of Poultry and Aquaculture, Institute of Animal Sciences, Agricultural Research Organization, Rishon Lezion, Israel.
Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2021 Jan 27;11:619352. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2020.619352. eCollection 2020.
The pituitary is a master endocrine gland that developed early in vertebrate evolution and therefore exists in all modern vertebrate classes. The last decade has transformed our view of this key organ. Traditionally, the pituitary has been viewed as a randomly organized collection of cells that respond to hypothalamic stimuli by secreting their content. However, recent studies have established that pituitary cells are organized in tightly wired large-scale networks that communicate with each other in both homo and heterotypic manners, allowing the gland to quickly adapt to changing physiological demands. These networks functionally decode and integrate the hypothalamic and systemic stimuli and serve to optimize the pituitary output into the generation of physiologically meaningful hormone pulses. The development of 3D imaging methods and transgenic models have allowed us to expand the research of functional pituitary networks into several vertebrate classes. Here we review the establishment of pituitary cell networks throughout vertebrate evolution and highlight the main perspectives and future directions needed to decipher the way by which pituitary networks serve to generate hormone pulses in vertebrates.
垂体是一种主要的内分泌腺，在脊椎动物进化的早期就已经出现，因此存在于所有现代脊椎动物类群中。过去十年改变了我们对这个关键器官的看法。传统上，垂体被视为随机组织的细胞集合，通过分泌其内容物对下丘脑刺激作出反应。然而，最近的研究已经证实，垂体细胞是组织在紧密连接的大规模网络中，以同型和异型的方式相互交流，使腺体能够快速适应不断变化的生理需求。这些网络在功能上解码和整合下丘脑和全身刺激，并有助于优化垂体输出，产生具有生理意义的激素脉冲。三维成像方法和转基因模型的发展使我们能够将功能性垂体网络的研究扩展到几个脊椎动物类群。在这里，我们回顾了整个脊椎动物进化过程中垂体细胞网络的建立，并强调了解析垂体网络在脊椎动物中产生激素脉冲的方式所需的主要观点和未来方向。
