BRIEF REVIEW
Introduction: Recent insights into the urinary concentrating mechanism: from cDNA cloning to modeling renal function

¹ Renal Division, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Institutes of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts 02115; and ² Laboratory of Kidney and Electrolyte Metabolism, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892

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Hediger, Matthias, and Mark A. Knepper. Introduction: Recent insights into the urinary concentrating mechanism: from cDNA cloning to modeling renal function. Am. J. Physiol. 275 (Renal Physiol. 44): F317, 1998.In the past few years, considerable progress has been made in cloning key proteins involved in the urinary concentrating process. These include water channels, NaCl transporters, urea transporters, vasopressin receptors, and ion channels. A challenging task now is to determine the precise functional roles of these proteins. What follows are a series of minireviews, which are based on a symposium held at the Experimental Biology '97 meetings in New Orleans. The focus of this symposium was to review recent insights into the urinary concentrating process based on molecular biological and physiological studies. As highlighted in the reviews, new data on the function, localization, and regulation of kidney transporters/channels have provided exciting molecular information on the contribution of these proteins to the urinary concentrating process.