Drowning in data: early responses of renal cortical collecting duct cells to lithium

It is now more than fifty years since Burg made a signal advance in the study of renal physiology by reporting a method of isolating and perfusing tubules from selected regions of the kidney (1). Prior to this, knowledge of renal tubular function had been derived either from micropuncture experiments, limited to the superficial regions of the kidney (2) , from kidney slices (3-6), which were subject to injury and represented an aggregate of tubular function, or from renal cells in tissue culture (7-9).