Control Centre

When a swarm of alien spacecraft invades Earth there's usually a narratively convenient mothership that controls all the others, enabling our heroes to counter the invasion from one point. A new study takes this as inspiration to name structures in the kidney ‘mother glomeruli’. Glomeruli are intricate networks of blood vessels in the nephrons, structural units of the kidney essential for filtering blood. The research mapped the 3-dimensional connectivity of nephrons, tracking how processes like blood pressure regulation and filtration are coordinated. It revealed an extensive nerve network (pictured, blue and red) connecting nephron segments organising glomeruli into distinct communities, linked together through a ‘mother glomeruli’ control centre (white, at the centre of an hourglass-structured network of spheroid glomeruli). This pattern of organisation, which repeats across the kidney, is underdeveloped in newborn kidneys and disrupted in conditions like diabetes and enables the synchronised maintenance of fluid balance.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Liam McLaughlin and Bo Zhang, and colleagues
• Department of Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, June 2025