Copycat Kidneys

When it comes to understanding how the human body copes with injury or disease, we often turn to mimics, be they animal models or collections of cells like organoids. Organoids — tissues grown artificially in dishes — are being improved on to mimic human organs in health and disease as closely as possible. Now researchers have grown human kidney organoids from human stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The team surveyed over 450,000 cells from 49 kidney organoids, examining the genes activated. Tagged using immunofluorescence, they also looked at the proteins present in each organoid (pictured). Different kidney cells were identified (red, green, blue) but cells unintended to form organoids, ‘off-target’ cells, were also detected. Transplanting the organoids into mouse kidneys considerably reduced the presence of off-target cells, resulting in better mimics of the human kidney. This brings us closer to developing a powerful model for human kidney research.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Ayshwarya Subramanian, Eriene-Heidi Sidhom and Maheswarareddy Emani, and colleagues
• Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, December 2019