Renal substrate uptake, oxygen consumption and gluconeogenesis at low temperature.

One of the important needs in the surgery of renal transplantation is the long-term preservation of the removed kidney. Up to now, preservation time has been limited to about 72 hours. The viability of the stored organ decreases sharply with prolongation of the preservation over 24 hours. At present, two methods of preservation are widely used: the storage of the organ in a cold electrolyte solution, and the continuous, hypothermic perfusion with albumin or cryoprecipitated plasma [1]. Both methods require a low temperature to reduce the endogenous renal metabolism. Besides the quality of the removed kidney, the type of perfusate and the duration of perfusion, two other factors might influence the viability and later function of the transplanted kidney: the absolute temperature during preservation, and the supply of energy - yielding substrates to the isolated kidney [2,3]. Up to now, the influence of the latter factor on the metabolic performance of the kidney tissue has been studied only in a few investigations [4,5,6,7]. In the following study, we determined the uptake of various energy - yielding substrates, oxygen consumption and gluconeogenesis at various low temperatures in isolated rat kidney tubules.