Long-Term Culture of Nephron Progenitor Cells Ex Vivo.

Nephrons differentiate from the cap mesenchyme of the fetal kidney. Nephron progenitor cells that populate the cap mesenchyme efficiently balance self-renewal and epithelial differentiation to enable repeated rounds of nephron formation during development. Here we describe a method to isolate and propagate these cells from the embryonic mouse kidney. Using this method, nephron progenitor cells from a single litter of mice can be propagated to hundreds of millions of cells that express appropriate markers of the undifferentiated state and retain epithelial differentiation capacity in vitro.