The University of Edinburgh

More information about the University of Edinburgh is available at http://www.ed.ac.uk

More information about the Davies lab is available at http://golgi.ana.ed.ac.uk/davieslab/

The Edinburgh laboratory has over a decade’s experience in using organ culture to investigate kidney development; either on our own or in joint publications; we were the first to identify signaling pathways in developing kidneys, the first to develop cell-free induction methods, the first to identify growth factors that control renal epithelial development, the first to identify the critical role of particular glycosaminoglycans to renal development, the first to apply RNAi to renal organ culture and the first to apply bioinformatics approaches to renal development. The Edinburgh group has extensive facilities for developmental cell biology, including ‘standard’ items such as confocal microscopes, histology services, array services etc, and also more unusual items such as optical projection tomography. We have particular expertise in organ culture and have developed a number of novel techniques, including RNAi, to analyse kidney development this way. We also run the Kidney Development Database and receive funding from the NIH for the development of a database for high-throughput screens of gene expression in developing urogenital tissues (‘GUDMAP’).

The following staff are involved:-