To investigate how the glycosylation of podocyte proteins changes during diabetic kidney disease

Podocytes are cells of the visceral epithelium in the kidneys and form a crucial component of the glomerular filtration barrier, contributing to size selectivity and maintaining a massive filtration surface. We are interested in pursuing a microarray analysis to identify the glycosylation-related genes that are modulated in podocytes during insulin and glucose stimulation. As such, we propose to isolate RNA from cultured AB 8/13 human podocyte cell line in their normal state and treated with different concentrations of insulin and glucose. Initially, we would like to analyze 12 samples (Normal control, 2 Starved controls, Insulin experiments 1-4, and glucose experiments 1-5). These experiments would give us information on the gene regulation changes in different healthy and diabetic conditions. In addition to providing possible identification of the unknown proteins involved with diabetic nephropathy, such analysis would provide novel information about early responses by podocytes in response to insulin and glucose level changes in vitro. The results from this analysis will be utilized to focus our research with regard to glycosylation of the proteins in the podocyte slit diaphragm.