Taking a spin around the kidney vasculature #FluorescenceFriday

Flashback #FluorescenceFriday to some of the first light-sheet imaging we were doing. Video shows the collecting duct system of the developing kidney labeled with a pan-cytokeratin antibody. Courtesy of former talented technician Deanna Hardesty.

🚨 Kidney + AI milestone 🚨 Never been more excited to share!!! We built Nephrobase Cell+, the first multispecies, multimodal kidney foundation model: Trained on ~40M cells Across 4 species (human, mouse, rat, pig) From 5 modalities (scRNA, snRNA, snATAC, CosMx, Xenium) Kidney

Outstanding opportunity for early career researchers! If you want to know more about the editorial process, do not hesitate and apply! 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

Sharing this excellent review now out from postdoc Sarah McLarnon! Lots of useful info on 3D imaging, quantification of imaging data, and how this has been applied to the kidney. #FluorescenceFriday figure with our own imaging data! https://t.co/FH6wTlq8l0

And a zoomed view of the intricate collecting system.

For this #FluorescenceFriday, an image of an adult mouse kidney labeled with AQP2 and alpha SMA antibodies. AQP2 (green) marks the collecting duct and distal connecting segment while SMA marks the arterial tree. Courtesy of talented postdoc Sarah McLarnon.

Excited to share our latest preprint led by Kelli Johnson- Mapping mesenchymal diversity in the developing human intestine and organoids! We defined 5 mesenchymal populations occupying discrete anatomical locations within the human intestine. https://t.co/rzSfsdGhjO

They managed to do somite transplants 😱

Intermediate mesoderm isn't the sole contributor to nephrons in zebrafish-new manuscript out showing somites are a source of nephron progenitors! Led by Alan Davidson's group. Many fun discussions were had-grateful for the inclusion!

#FluorescenceFriday! Thanks BPoD!

Disorganized kidney blood vessels may limit tissue damage after injury and even provide better blood flow with age, adding new considerations for #kidney #regeneration and #TissueEngineering. Read the new study by @S_Ray_09 and @l_obrien_lab below.

This was a fun lesson in having your hypothesis proven wrong (we thought they would have worse outcomes after injury), and that is even more exciting. We hope what we find may help inform tissue engineering and regenerative strategies, and lead to improved clinical interventions.

So how is the disrupted patterning protective and possibly more resilient? This is what we are following up on. Story to be continued! Thanks to the other lab members who contributed and a special thanks to our wonderful collaborator Tomo Souma and team for helping assess injury.

As vascular density can decrease with age, we looked at older animals. Interestingly, we found better preservation of perfused vasculature in the older mutant mice.

Post-ischemia the vasculature appears comparable in both controls and mutants. No significant loss in density. The only visible difference is the mispatterning.

What about after a moderate acute ischemic injury? Are the kidneys with vascular mispatterning more susceptible? Surprisingly, the mistpatterned mutants of both sexes are better protected! There is less tubular injury and kidney function is improved.

We followed up the adults and investigated how the kidneys appear histologically and whether physiological function is altered. It all looks normal, for both males and females.

In our 2023 paper we found that deletion of the guidance cue netrin-1 from kidney stromal progenitors leads to stochastic vascular patterning. We showed that the altered patterning persists in the adult kidney at 2-3 months of age, although other vascular metrics were similar.

For #FluorescenceFriday sharing the fantastic work of postdoc Sarah McLarnon! A follow up to our '23 Development paper where we asked: Does precise vascular patterning matter for function and what happens after ischemic injury? The results were surprising! https://t.co/XG5ZOB9lHv

🔬 Exciting news! @UNC_CBP is launching a new 9-month non-thesis biomedical master's degree! Gain real-world experience in a research lab plus professional development training for your future career. 👉 Applications open until May 15: https://t.co/TI2V6kCrMY