Urinary tract obstruction (UTO) may be unilateral, which is often asymptomatic, presenting late with chronic obstructive uropathy1, or may present acutely with renal colic and/or hematuria; acute pyelonephritis or post-renal acute kidney injury (AKI)2. Key to the management of UTO is early reversal of obstruction2. However, despite effective reversal and the use of generic therapies to delay the progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD), affected patients remain at increased risk of progressive CKD and hypertension3,4. In addition, long-term urinary concentrating capacity (UCC) is often impaired5, which may predispose susceptible patients to dehydration and recurrent AKI, accelerating the progressive decline in renal function after UTO.
In part, this failure to identify therapeutic approaches to improve long-term outcomes in patients with UTO has resulted from our reliance on the use of irreversible unilateral ureteric obstruction (UUO) models to explore the pathobiology of UTO. However, these models do not replicate the clinical situation in which patients undergo reversal soon after diagnosis and cannot be used to explore the mechanisms and therapeutic approaches that could be used to improve long-term repair after the obstruction is reversed. Reversible UUO (R-UUO) models have been developed to address this, but these are more technically challenging than the irreversible UUO models, more difficult to reproduce by different laboratories, and, as a result, have not been as widely adopted by the scientific community. Mouse models are attractive since they can be used to harness the power of mouse genetics to study disease pathophysiology, but they have been particularly challenging to optimize as the methods often lead to irreversible UUO if the obstruction lasts more than 3 days6. A variety of approaches have been deployed to address this, including multi-surgery, sequential placement of clamps along the ureter every 2 days6,7; UUO followed by bladder reimplantation8,9,10,11; and use non-damaging clamps and tubing to obstruct the ureter12,13,14. Long-term outcome studies in rats and mice have shown improved renal function, reduced fibrosis, and/or glomerular injury after reversal of obstruction, but only partial recovery if UUO lasts longer than 2 days6,7,8,9,12,14,15,16,17,18,19. In addition, while the renal medulla (RM) is particularly susceptible to damage caused by UTO20,21 until recently, there have been no long-term rodent studies in which the effects of prolonged R-UUO on RM structure and function have been studied. This is significant since UCC and the ability to excrete salt loads without increasing blood pressure (the so-called pressure natriuresis response) are dependent on maintaining anatomic integrity of the RM22,23,24, so that incomplete repair of the RM after reversal of UTO may explain why patients have increased susceptibility to recurrent AKI and hypertension after reversal of UTO. However, many of the techniques required to evaluate this require multiple rounds of surgery (five major surgeries for 6 days of obstruction6,7), require surgical expertise that is difficult to teach (e.g., surgical reimplantation of the ureter into the bladder8,9,10,11), and because obstruction is unilateral, make it challenging for investigators to evaluate changes in renal function after reversal of the obstruction.
To address this, we have developed a mouse model of R-UUO that is relatively simple to perform and teach, requires a more limited number of surgeries than other techniques (three surgeries for 5 to 7 days of obstruction), and allows for the analysis of renal functional recovery without the need for invasive and/or expensive split renal function studies25. For this, mice undergo three major surgeries: 1) placement of a non-traumatic vascular clamp on the proximal left ureter; 2) removal of the vascular clamp 5 to 7 days later, depending on the mouse strain; and 3) removal of the contralateral kidney 10 days later to evaluate renal function. Approximately 20 to 40% of mice die within 2-3 days of the nephrectomy, indicating that the UUO does not reverse in all mice. Long-term follow-up of the surviving mice shows that despite the near complete histological recovery of the renal medulla (RM) 3 months after R-UUO. There is reduced renal function, measured by transdermal glomerular filtration rate (tGFR)26. In addition, there is a marked reduction in UCC, determined by measuring urinary osmolality after water restriction, suggesting there is a permanent defect in RM function. Time course studies show that while there is improvement in tGFR between days 28 and 56 post-RUUO, this stabilizes between days 56 and 84. In contrast, there is no improvement in UCC between days 28 and 84 after R-UUO25. Using scRNA-Seq of isolated RMs, validated by cell lineage and immunohistochemistry studies, we identified strong regenerative responses that restored RM dimensions after R-UUO but that all of the major cellular compartments in the RM showed permanent changes in cell numbers and gene signatures that are likely to impact functional recovery after R-UUO. This included persistent proinflammatory responses in the RM collecting duct and loop of Henle cell populations 84 days after R-UUO, similar to the inflammatory and senescence signatures of failed repair proximal tubular epithelial cells after AKI and UUO27,28,29,30. Similar changes were also seen in RM collecting ducts from patients with recurrent renal stone disease31, suggesting there is a common injury response to RM damage in both humans and mice. In this article, we provide detailed instructions on how we perform these surgeries, how we optimize conditions for its use in different mouse strains, how we determine whether the ureter is still obstructed after reversal, how we evaluate key functional outcomes, and how we harvest renal tissues to assess the renal medullary structures.