The kidney, in all its complexity, is captured in an atlas that could aid disease research
The kidneys are some of the most architecturally complex organs in the human body — intricate in a way that becomes frustrating when, for millions of people each year, they lose function.
It’s only in recent decades that scientists have been able to leverage new techniques, like the ever-growing list of “-omics,” to peer deep inside human cells. This week, in a major milestone aided by those technologies and preceded by years of work by thousands of researchers, a detailed atlas of the human kidney was unveiled to the public via a paper published in Nature. Researchers involved consider it the most comprehensive kidney tissue model to date, and think it could be a vital resource in the study of how the organs go awry, and how to stop it.
