Web-based tools for quantitative renal physiology

We present the development strategy and present state of progress on an interactive website project for quantitative renal physiology: a) a quantitative kidney database (QKDB), and b) an interactive website presenting mathematical models covering the major aspects of renal physiology. QKDB will house data for quantitative evaluation of hypotheses of renal function, from the cellular, through the epithelial and tubular, to whole organ levels. It will thus facilitate comparisons among different species and under various experimental conditions. It will include especially: transport parameters, tubular concentrations and flow rates along the various nephron segments, and anatomical details, in human kidneys, in experimentally studied species, and in model epithelia, such as cultured cells and amphibian skin and urinary bladder. The modeling resource will provide an interactive user interface to a collection of published models at all levels of renal physiology, enabling non-modelers to exploit the models, altering key parameters according to hypotheses of their own and visualizing the simulation results, thus permitting quantitative exploration of new hypotheses. Implementation will be facilitated by translation of the models into a common markup language such as CellML (cell markup language) and SBML (systems biology markup language). There will thus be a modular separation of model descriptions from their numerical solution methods.