Urea uptake and translocation in toad urinary bladder: the effect of antidiuretic hormone

The uptake of C14-urea into everted and noneverted bladder sacs was compared, over short time periods (up to 2 min), with the transepithelial urea fluxes. This method allowed the study of the time course of urea uptake and distribution, while previously this problem was only studied in steady-state conditions. When mucosal uptake was studied no accumulation of C14-urea inside the tissue was observed, indicating that the mucosal border could be the limiting step. Comparative studies of urea and inulin uptake from the serosal side showed that urea equilibrated with the water epithelial cells in less than 30 sec. This accumulation suggested again that the mucosal border is an effective barrier for urea translocation. The kinetics of the increase in urea permeability induced by antidiuretic hormone was also studied and it was similar (T1/2:4.3 min) to the kinetics of the increase in water permeability induced by the hormone (T1/2:5.6 min). A strong parallelism was also observed between the time course of the increases in water and urea permeabilities induced by medium hypertonicity (T1/2 25 and 26 min, respectively). The values obtained for the permeability coefficient ktrans), either at rest or under ADH were similar to those previously reported employing steady-state techniques (28+/-8 and 432+/-25 cm-sec-1-10(-7), respectively).