Advances in pituitary pathology: use of novel techniques

Many new techniques are rapidly being developed and applied to the study of normal and neoplastic pituitary tissues. These range from techniques used for the past few decades such as in situ hybridization to more recent developments such as comparative genomic hybridization, laser capture microdissection, DNA and tissue arrays, proteomics, and RNA interference technology. These approaches have been applied to answer many challenging questions about pituitary function and pathophysiology. This chapter reviews many of these recent developments and shows their applications to pituitary biology in order to demonstrate how these new techniques are providing insights about basic aspects, clinical, and pharmacologic knowledge of the pituitary gland and of pituitary tumors.