Molecular approaches to renal physiology and therapeutics

The recent development of methods to transfer, mutate, or ablate genes in vivo has provided renal investigators and physicians with powerful tools to explore normal renal physiology, the pathophysiological basis of renal disease, and potential therapeutic interventions. The use of transgenic and knockout mice to produce gain-of-function and loss-of-function mutations, and to create animal models of human hereditary renal diseases, permits unprecedented versatility and power of experimental design. Conditional and inducible gene targeting methods to control the temporal and spatial expression of transgenes offer considerable promise in studying the impact of normal and disease genes in the kidney. In vivo gene transfer of encoding DNAs, antisense DNA and RNA, and cis-element decoys allows manipulation of specific genes in somatic cells. Liposome-mediated, virally mediated, and ex vivo transduced renal cells represent novel approaches to facilitate in vivo gene transfer to the kidney.