Electrolyte and Metabolite Composition of Cystic Fluid from a rat model of ARPKD

Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) is a devastating inherited kidney disease that is a major cause of kidney failure. Large fluid-filled cysts develop in the kidney and continually expand over time, damaging the surrounding tissue until renal replacement therapy is required. Because the development of cysts is the major feature of this disease, researchers have long sought to determine the composition of cystic fluid. To the best of our knowledge, no one has previously published the ion concentrations of cystic fluid from any PKD rodent models. The overall goal of this study was to characterize the cyst fluid composition of a rat model of ARPKD, the PCK rat. This model developed spontaneously from the Charles River Japan cesarean derived Sprague Dawley (Crj:CD/SD) strain and features a mutation in Pkhd1, the ortholog to the causative ARPKD gene in humans. In addition to analyzing cystic fluid, we complemented our metabolomics approach with transcriptomic analysis of male and female PCK rat kidney cortex tissue. We used the PCK rats, a model of ARPKD (male and female rats, 12-14 wks) and performed RNAseq on kidney tissue to assess sex differences in this PKD rat model