Unlike adult mammals, which can repair but not regenerate new nephrons, fish generate nephrons de novo throughout life and after kidney injury. To explore mechanisms of kidney regeneration that could one day be applied to treat renal disease in humans, Diep et al. used the zebrafish as a model to identify and characterise progenitor cells responsible for nephron regeneration. Using transplantation experiments, they traced the source of new adult nephrons back to small aggregates of cells containing kidney progenitors. As previously found for mouse nephrons, individual zebrafish nephrons are derived from multiple nephron progenitors, which the authors suggest have self-renewing properties. Furthermore, gene-expression analyses indicated conservation between mammals and zebrafish with respect to the factors involved in renal development. These results provide hope that nephron progenitors with self-renewing potential might also be present in the human adult kidney and could be coaxed out of a dormant state to stimulate kidney regeneration following injury or disease.
OpenUrlCrossRefPubMedWeb of Science
- Written by editorial staff. © 2011. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly cited and all further distributions of the work or adaptation are subject to the same Creative Commons License terms.
Article navigation
Related articles
Cited by...
More in this TOC section
Similar articles
Other journals from The Company of Biologists
Editor’s Choice – Altered expression of the Cdk5 activator-like protein, Cdk5α, causes neurodegeneration, in part by accelerating the rate of aging
By developing a comprehensive and quantitative metric for physiological age of Drosophila, Edward Giniger and colleagues show that a neurodegeneration mutant produces its effects in part by accelerating the absolute rate of aging.
First Person interviews
Have you seen our interviews with the early-career first authors of our papers? Recently, we caught up with first authors Sarah Foriel, Henna Myllymäki and Mirja Niskanen, Wenqing Zhou, Rifdat Aoidi and Amy Irving.
Review – Metastasis in context: modeling the tumor microenvironment with cancer-on-a-chip approaches
In a new Review article, Jaap M. J. den Toonder and colleagues evaluate the recent contributions of cancer-on-a-chip models to our understanding of the tumor microenvironment and its role in the onset of metastasis. The authors also provide an outlook for future applications of this emerging technology.
DMM Conference Travel Grants
Are you an early career scientist with plans to attend a scientific meeting, conference, workshop or course relating to the areas of research covered by DMM? The next round of applications for DMM Conference Travel Grants closes on 4 May 2018. Find out more here and get your application in soon.
Why should you publish your next paper in DMM?
DMM aims to promote human health by encouraging collaboration between basic and clinical researchers, covering a diverse range of diseases, approaches and models. Our Editors are all active researchers in the field – your peers, colleagues and mentors, who know how much work has gone into every paper. Recently, we have introduced format-free submission, and we accept peer review reports from other journals, making submission as easy as possible for our authors. Send us your next great paper – publish with us and you'll be in good company.