Introducing blood flow in kidney explants by engraftment onto the chick chorioallantoic membrane is not sufficient to induce arterial smooth muscle cell development

Kidney explant cultures are an important tool to gain insights into developmental processes, insights that can be used to develop strategies for engineering kidneys from stem cells. However, explants are not connected to a perfused vascular system. This limits their survival and limits physiological studies, for example of blood filtration, the main function of the kidney. Previous studies have shown that grafting kidneys on to avian chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) can establish perfusion and enable glomerular vascularization, but the realism and maturity of the resultant vasculature has not been examined. Here we show that vasculature of kidney explants grafted on to CAM is very different from natural kidney vasculature, showing excessive growth of endothelial cells, absence of a hierarchical arterio-venous network, and no vascular smooth muscle cell recruitment. The model therefore has serious limits. This dataset contains images of embryonic kidneys that were grafted onto the chick chorioallantoic membrane in order to evaluate the realism of the forming vasculature. # Note on opening image files # The .nd2 image files can be opened using an ImageJ plugin. At the time of writing, either the ImageJ Nikon ND2 Reader plugin for Windows or the Bio-formats plugin for other platforms, see https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/plugins/nd2-reader.html .