Scott Charles Beeman1,
John F. Bertram2, Jennifer R. Charlton3, Teresa Wu1,
Min Zhang1, Kevin M. Bennett1
1Arizona
State University, Tempe, AZ, United States; 2Monash University,
Clayton, Victoria, Australia; 3University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA, United States
Glomerular number plays an important role in a wide range of renal and systemic diseases, though the techniques currently employed to count glomeruli are estimates extrapolated from a small sample. A method for counting every glomerulus in the kidney would provide information never before available. Here, we demonstrate the first steps taken towards visualizing and counting all glomeruli in the mouse kidney. With the huge library of transgenic mouse models employed in kidney research, such a technique may prove vital to basic kidney research.