Scanning electron microscopy of the glomerular filtration membrane in the rat kidney

The rat kidney was perfused with saline and glutaraldehyde, treated with Murakami's tannin-osmium impregnation method, ethanol-freeze cracked and dried by the critical point method. Gold-palladium evaporated specimens were observed in a field-emission scanning electron microscope. The glomerular filtration membrane, fractured in different planes was observed with the following results: 1. Adjacent pedicles originate from different podocytes. No interpedicular bridges of apparent cytoplasmic nature could be found. 2. The basement membrane, in grazing fractures shows a horizontally layered architecture. 3. The attenuated endothelial sheet (lamina fenestrata) is divided into compartments, which we suggest should be called "areolae fenestratae", by cytoplasmic crests radiating from the nucleated portion of the endothelial cell. A crest also occurs along the cell margin, which contacts a similar crest at the margin of the adjacent cell. 4. The pores in the areolae fenestratae are variable in size (30-150 nm diameter). A knob-like projection from the apparently naked basement membrane is found in a portion of the pores. 5. Numerous microvilli may occur on the endothelium. Some of them anastomose and fuse with one another to form a net whose meshes appear identical with the endothelial pores. Domes and shelves formed of a fenestrated cytoplasmic sheet also occur above the ordinary level of the endothelial lining. A hypothesis implicating microvilli in the partial renewal of the endothelial sheet is proposed.