Recent Insights into Kidney Injury and Repair from Transcriptomic Analyses

Injured tubular epithelium exhibits cellular plasticity in that it can dedifferentiate, reenter the cell cycle, and subsequently either redifferentiate or adopt a chronically injured phenotype. Although some nephrogenic genes are reexpressed during injury and repair, developmental pathways are only partially recapitulated and the process is more accurately viewed as an entirely new program intrinsic to the regenerative response to injury. Recent advances in our understanding of the molecular circuitry underpinning epithelial plasticity have come from bulk, cell-specific, and single-cell transcriptomic analyses. These results have begun to define the signaling pathways and gene regulatory networks governing the epithelial injury response. In this review, we highlight recent transcriptomic analyses in kidney injury, repair and fibrosis, and outline the ways that these studies are improving our understanding of kidney regeneration.