Salt, diet and hypertension: an integrative in vivo physiological investigation of WNK pathway-controlled renal electrolyte and blood pressure homeostasis

The WNK pathway presents exciting new targets for treating high blood pressure (hypertension), which contributes to ~13 per cent of global deaths. Keith's fellowship focuses on understanding how WNK links together dietary sodium and potassium intake with the kidney’s role in balancing these salts and blood pressure control. He will develop a novel approach combining micropuncture studies of kidney tubule ion transport and intravital imaging of fluorescent biosensors to measure intracellular ions (with Professor Robert Unwin, UCL) with tubule morphology and protein expression/localisation from 3D reconstructed images of CLARITY-treated tissues and helium ion microscopy ultrastructure (with Professor Dennis Brown, Harvard University).