Pituitary Hormone Gene Expression and Secretion in Human Growth Hormone-Releasing Hormone Transgenic Mice: Focus on Lactotroph Function1

Regulation of growth hormone-releasing hormone gene expression and biosynthesis.

Growth hormone-releasing hormone (GRH) was initially isolated, characterized, sequenced, and cloned from human tumors and subsequently from the hypothalamus of humans and other animal species. Extensive structure-function studies have indicated the amino terminus to be most important for its biologic action, and the primary mechanism of its bioinactivation occurs by cleavage of an amino termina...

Pituitary-specific expression and Pit-1 regulation of the rat growth hormone-releasing hormone receptor gene.

The GHRH receptor is expressed in the somatotroph cell of the anterior pituitary, where it functions to mediate GHRH-stimulated GH release. To study pituitary and somatotroph cell-specific expression of this gene, a transgenic mouse model and complementary cell culture experiments were developed. The activity of the 1.6-kb proximal rat GHRH receptor promoter was examined in vivo by generating t...

Atrazine Binds to the Growth Hormone–Releasing Hormone Receptor and Affects Growth Hormone Gene Expression

BACKGROUND Atrazine (ATR), a commonly used herbicide in the United States, is widely distributed in water and soil because of its mobility through ecosystems and its persistence in the environment. ATR has been associated with defects in sexual development in animals, but studies on mammalian systems have failed to clearly identify a cellular target. OBJECTIVES Our goal in this study was to i...

Comparison of Expression of Growth Hormone-Releasing Hormone and Its Receptor Splice Variant 1 in Different Stages of Endometriosis

Pituitary growth hormone and growth hormone-releasing hormone receptor genes and associations with mammographic measures and serum growth hormone.

BACKGROUND Mammographic density is a strong risk factor for breast cancer that is heritable and associated with blood levels of growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I). We tested single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in pituitary growth hormone (GH1) and growth hormone-releasing hormone receptor (GHRHR) genes for an association with mammographic density, hormones of the growth h...