Expression of androgen receptor and estrogen receptor-alpha in the developing pituitary gland of male sheep lamb.

To explore the expression of androgen receptor (AR) and estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) in the developing pituitary of male lamb, we detected AR and ERα expression in the anterior pituitary of lambs aged 2-7 months old by immunohistochemistry. The results showed that both AR immunoreactivity (AR-ir) and ERα immunoreactivity (ERα-ir) were localized in the nuclei of anterior pituitary cell. The percentage of the anterior pituitary cells expressing ERα fluctuated from 8.79±0.02% to 11.80±0.04% during the examined stages, but fell significantly to the lowest level at 6 months. While the proportion of AR-ir showed significant changes, it was in 11.52±1.26% at 2 months, it firstly increased to 19.86±1.03% at 3 months, and then significantly decreased to 8.18±1.17% at 6 months (P<0.05). The expression of both AR-ir and ERα-ir were the lowest level at 6 months old. By staining for PCNA, we observed that the changes in expression of AR and ERα at different lamb ages did not result from cell proliferation of anterior pituitary cells. These results indicate that both AR and ERα are important in regulation of secretary function of anterior pituitary in sheep lamb, although the related mechanism needs to be elucidated further.

Uterine autonomic nerve innervation plays a crucial role in regulating rat uterine mast cell functions during embryo implantation.

To explore the potential mechanism of how uterine innervations would affect the uterine mast cell (MC) population and functions during the periimplantation. We herein first examined the consequence of uterine neurectomy on embryo implantation events. We observed that amputation of autonomic nerves innervating the uterus led to on-time implantation failure in rats. Exploiting MC culture and ELISA approaches, we then further analyzed the effect of neurectomy on cellular histamine levels and its release from uterine MCs, to elucidate the relation of the autonomic nerves and local cellular immunity in the uterine during early pregnancy. We observed that disconnection of autonomic nerve innervation significantly increased the population of uterine MCs. Most interestingly, these increased number of uterine MCs in neuroectomized rats contained a much reduced cellular level of histamine. Our subsequent challenge experiments revealed that uterine MCs in nerve amputated rats exhibited enhanced histamine releasing rate in response to substance P and antiIgE, suggesting loss of nerve innervation in the uterus not only increases the population of uterine MCs, but also facilitates the release of histamine from MCs, thus subsequently interfere with the normal implantation process. Collectively, our findings provide a new line of evidence supporting the concept that immune-neuro-endocrine network plays important role during pregnancy establishment and maintenance.