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This chapter will describe the use of infection with Listeria monocytogenes, a Gram-positive intracellular bacterium, to study immunological responses in the placenta. This bacterium is chosen because it has a predilection for replication in the placenta. As such, it is a significant pa ...

Establishment of proper oxygen and nutrient supply to the fetus is essential for a successful pregnancy. The maternal-fetal interface is the site of vascular modifications, providing a conduit for the delivery of essential nutrients to the developing fetus. Pregnancy-dependent ad ...

The use of animals is a necessary component of experimentation. The utilization of animals is a privilege not a right. Therefore, certain guidelines must be maintained in order to ensure their humane care and use. This chapter includes the basic principles of animal care and use, and reviews vario ...

Polycystic kidney disease (PKD) is a potentially life-threatening disorder that affects both adult and pediatric patients. PKD can be either inherited as a dominant (ADPKD) or a recessive trait (ARPKD) or acquired. The disease is characterized by massive renal enlargement associated w ...

For some diseases, a line of causality exists in which a given antecedent elicits a particular disorder, which can be treated by interrupting a specific pathway of events. Most biomedical scientists have uncritically adopted the “line-of-causality” metaphor, and have therefore selec ...

The freeze-fracture replica method was designed in the 1950s as a technique for analysis of fine structure of biological membranes. This method was furthered along with development and establishment of the fracture devices and cryotechniques in the 1970s.

Understanding the mechanisms of glomerular injury is critically dependent on the histologic assessment of cellular responses, immune processes, and ultrastructural changes. However, studies of human disease have been limited by a relative lack of tissue sampling. Renal biopsy is ...

Radionuclides have been used to study renal function clinically since the introduction of the radioisotope renogram by Taplin (1) and Kimball (2). This use is mainly directed at the excretory functions of the kidney that involve glomerular filtration and tubular secretion. Glomerular f ...

The measurement of renal function by imaging techniques is an important clinical and research tool. Early and reliable detection of changes in renal function are used to evaluate prognosis and the therapeutic approach to patients, and can be used to influence patient management. One intri ...

The assessment of single-nephron glomerular function is essential for understanding the fundamental regulatory mechanisms of renal hemodynamics (1). In earlier studies, special tracer techniques using fluorescence-labeled erythrocytes, radiolabeled microspher ...

The majority of renal physiological processes, including glomerular filtrate formation, tubular reabsorption and secretion, and regulation of cortical and medullary blood flow, involve the complex interaction of a number of different cell types. This is exemplified by the juxta ...

The atomic force microscope (AFM) (Fig. 1) is one of a family of “scanning-probe” microscopes. It was developed by Binnig, Quate, and Gerber in 1986 (1) from the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which was invented by Binnig and Rohrer in the first half of the 1980s (2). The STM produces images of surfaces of ...

This chapter describes the methodology for culture of the metanephros, the direct precursor of the adult mammalian kidney (1). The metanephros initially has two tissue compartments (Fig. 1 A,B): i) the ureteric bud epithelium, a branch of the mesonephric (Wolffian) duct, which itself branch ...

As demonstrated in the development of many parenchymal tissues, the metanephros is the product of an epithelial-mesenchymal interaction involving the proliferation, invasion, and branching morphogenesis of an epithelium into a juxtaposed stromal component that creates an ap ...

The development of the definitive (metanephric) kidney in mammals depends on the reciprocal inductive interactions between two mesoderm-derived structures: the metanephric mesenchyme (MM) and the epithelial ureteric bud. The ureteric bud secretes factors that induce the mes ...

Functional analysis of plasma-membrane receptors often involves the ectopic expression of receptor constructs in cultured cell lines followed by assay of the activation of cytosolic or nuclear signaling targets (1). Although in the simplest cases full-length receptors are expre ...

What is a polymorphism? Strictly speaking, a polymorphism is the occurrence in a population of two or more genetically determined forms in such frequencies that the rarest of them could not be maintained by mutation alone. For our purposes, we are examining polymorphic DNA, so that the polymorph ...

DNA array technologies provide powerful tools for comprehensive genomic and transcriptomic exploration in renal research. Applications of DNA arrays include analysis of disease predisposition by using single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) microarrays (1), reliable de ...

The entire human genetic code has been deciphered, and the DNA sequence information of most laboratory animals will be in the public domain in the near future. This will enable the analysis of gene expression in clinical specimen and disease models, which will help to study disease mechanisms. Ren ...

Nutrigenomics is the study of gene-nutrient interactions and how they affect the health and metabolism of an organism. Combining nutrigenomics with longevity studies is a natural extension and promises to help identify mechanisms whereby nutrients affect the aging process, life sp ...