Fishy Kidneys

At just three days old, a zebrafish embryo is busy building its internal organs. These images – taken using a high-powered electron microscope – show two of the multitude of tiny tubes within a growing fish kidney, made up of tightly packed cells clustered round a central hole. Falsely-coloured green are the endosomes, small packets of molecules that are important for helping cells to function properly. On the left is a healthy tube, but the one on the right comes from a fish with a faulty version of a gene called OCRL1. The endosomes are abnormal and the hole in the tube is much larger, causing kidney problems later in life. Faults in human OCRL1 also cause kidney defects, so figuring out what the gene is doing in fish will shed light on how things go wrong in our own species, pointing towards new treatments for sufferers.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image by Martin Lowe and colleagues
• University of Manchester, UK
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS Genetics, April 2015