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Review
Wnt signalling in kidney development and disease
Kaisa Pulkkinen, Subramanian Murugan and Seppo Vainio
volume 4 | issue 2
april/may/june 2008Pages: 55 - 59
This is an open-access article
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The Wnt gene family, which encodes secreted growth and differentiation factors, has been implicated in kidney organogenesis. The Wnts control both ureteric bud development and signalling, but they also serve as inductive factors to regulate nephrogenesis in the mesenchcymal cells. Several of the Wnt genes are expressed in the developing kidney, and gene knock-out studies have revealed specific developmental functions for these. Consistent with this, changes in Wnt ligands and pathway components are associated with many kidney diseases, including kidney cancers, renal fibrosis, cystic kidney diseases, acute renal failure, diabetic nephropathy and ischaemic injury. It is these associations of the Wnt signalling system with kidney development and kidney diseases that form to topic of this review.
Authors
Kaisa Pulkkinen
Department of Medical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Biocenter Oulu; Laboratory of Developmental Biology; University of Oulu; Oulu, Finland
Subramanian Murugan
Department of Medical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Biocenter Oulu; Laboratory of Developmental Biology; University of Oulu; Oulu, Finland
Seppo Vainio
Department of Medical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Biocenter Oulu; Laboratory of Developmental Biology; University of Oulu; Oulu, Finland
This is an open-access article
Download PDFIf the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.