library_construction_protocol: RNA was  precipitated and purified from anterior pituitary samples using the Qiagen RNeasy Plus Universal kit (Qiagen, UK) according to the manufacturer's guidelines, which included a step to remove any contaminating genomic DNA. cDNA libraries were prepared from high quality RNA  using the Illumina TruSeq stranded RNA sample prep kit (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA), following the manufacturer's instructions.