Lineage tracing reveals transient phenotypic adaptation of tubular cells during acute kidney injury

Tubular injury is the hallmark of acute kidney injury (AKI) with a tremendous impact on patients and health-care systems. During injury, any differentiated proximal tubular cell (PT) may transition into a specific injured phenotype, so-called “scattered tubular cell” (STC)-phenotype. To understand the fate of this specific phenotype, we generated transgenic mice allowing inducible, reversible, and irreversible tagging of these cells in a murine AKI model, the unilateral ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI). For lineage tracing, we analyzed the kidneys using single-cell profiling during disease development at various time points. Labeled cells, which we defined by established endogenous markers, already appeared 8 h after injury and showed a distinct expression set of genes. We show that STCs re-differentiate back into fully differentiated PTs upon the resolution of the injury. In summary, we show the dynamics of the phenotypic transition of PTs during injury, revealing a reversible transcriptional program as an adaptive response during disease.