The Hohenstein lab is interested in normal kidney development, how disruption of this leads to kidney disease and how better understanding of normal kidney development can help the development of renal regenerative medicine. Starting point for much of this is the development of Wilms’ tumours and the genes mutated in this. We use a variety of different mouse models with specific mutations, reporter alleles and conditional models to study the role of these genes in normal development and the earliest stages of Wilms’ tumour formation. Kidney organ cultures and their imaging, including time-lapse imaging of cultured kidneys, are important tools in this work. We also use these models as a source for in vitro cell culture systems which allows us to replace animals where possible and to perform experiments that require more cells than embryonic mouse kidneys can give us.
