Proteomic analysis of microdissected renal tubules

Kidney is a vital organ which help maintain body homeostasis. Three related processes including glomerular filtration, tubular reabsorption and secretion are precisely regulated in the kidney in response to changes in the amount of both water and various solutes. To understand how the kidney can achieve this challenging goal, it is important to know the protein composition in the kidney. However, unlike other solid organs, kidney has a very intricate architecture, including at least 14 distinct tubule segments. This reason limits the interpretibility of experiments perfomred using whole kidney homegenate samples. To mitigate this problem, we combined kidney tubule microdissection technique with protein mass spectrometry to study the proteome of 14 individual rat kidney tubule segment.