As a 2nd year nephrology fellow I am now doing some work in a lab which studies zebrafish kidney development. Here is an example of a control (wild-type) zebrafish at 54 hours post-fertilization.
If you use a morpholino (a form of antisense technology) to knock down a gene important for kidney function, you get massive edema after 3-4 days--as shown in the photos below. This is because zebrafish (a type of minnow native to India) live in freshwater, where the osmolarity is much lower than the intravascular osmolarity; with loss of renal salt and water homeostasis, volume overload ensues. This condition can be mitigated by putting the fish in saline water approximating the fish's endogenous osmolarity.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Proof That Kidneys Are Important
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