Library · Histology
Nephron histology
Make it clearer
Under the microscope, the nephron has an unmistakable look: a tangle. The glomerulus, which is the kidney's filter, is made of capillaries, the finest blood vessels, wound around one another like a ball of yarn, and that ball sits inside a capsule that lets no fluid escape, Bowman's capsule. A ball of yarn in a cup.
What separates the blood from the filtered fluid is not a single wall; it is three stacked structures that together are called the filtration barrier. The outermost layer is made of podocytes, specialized cells that drape over and line the glomerular basement membrane, which is the capillary's supporting sheet. Past the filter the scenery changes completely: the proximal convoluted tubule, the first segment of the tube, is lined by a simple cuboidal epithelium, a single row of cube-shaped cells, and those cells are devoted to absorbing and moving water, electrolytes, which are the body's salts, and other dissolved substances.
In brief
The glomerulus is made up of a tuft of capillaries surrounded by an impermeable capsule, Bowman's capsule.
The glomerulus is a ball of yarn sitting in a cup: the capillaries are the yarn, the capsule is the cup.
Its filtration barrier is made up of three structures, and the outermost layer is made of podocytes, specialized cells that line the glomerular basement membrane.
The proximal convoluted tubule, by contrast, is a simple cuboidal epithelium devoted to absorbing and transporting water, electrolytes and other solutes.
Sources (1)
- National Center for Biotechnology InformationHistology, Nephron. StatPearls
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