Most cells that control puberty are late bloomers
mouse pituatary glands
Postnatal gonadotrophs (yellow, left) are far more common in mouse pituitary glands than ones that arise during development (green, right). Sheridan et al./Nature Communications (2025)
During puberty, a group of cells in the pituitary—a tiny gland located at the base of the brain—spring into action. These cells, known as gonadotrophs, release hormones that stimulate the ovaries and testes to mature and start making eggs or sperm—setting off the cascade of changes that make puberty an embarrassing nightmare for most adolescents. But although scientists originally thought people were born with all their gonadotrophs ready to go, new experiments in mice suggest most of these cells are actually produced after birth.
By genetically marking and tracking a pool of stem cells in the pituitary gland, researchers discovered that almost all of them transformed into gonadotrophs rather than other types of pituitary cells. This process begins after birth, the team reports, and continues during the “minipuberty” period—a temporary surge of hormone activity that occurs in humans as well as mice, starting shortly after birth and lasting months to years. And while embryonic gonadotrophs are confined to a small, central region in the pituitary, those that arise later from stem cells spread out across the entire gland. “ We’ve known about this population of stem cells in the pituitary for a while, but it took the right tools used at the right time to see just how important they are,” senior study author Karine Rizzotti explains in a statement. “Instead of the previously held idea that gonadotrophs all have the same origin, we instead found that there are two waves of generation, before and after birth.”
The discovery could eventually help children with a rare genetic disorder called congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (CHH), who don’t produce the hormone that initially stimulates gonadotrophs—preventing them from going through puberty later in life. This new research suggests that mini-puberty is a window of opportunity, during which doctors can check to see if gonadotrophs are forming properly and intervene early if they aren’t.