- So in order to take a look
at our loops of Henle, I'm actually going to take us
to my favorite place, the University
of Michigan histology site. These guys are amazing. You can actually see
the entire kidney. And we're going to be able
to go in and mess around, just like you can in lab
with your slides. It's nice, because they always
leave you a big picture, and they give you
a little red box to show you where you
are zoomed into. So if you take a look at the big
picture of this kidney, I don't know if it's just
because it's me, but I totally can see
the cortex of this kidney. Out here, I can see that line. And then I can totally
see the medulla of the kidney.
Do you agree with that? So, I can't see renal pyramids.
That's okay. But I can definitely
tell the difference between cortex and medulla. What structures are we going
to expect to find in the cortex? Well, right away we know.
Look. I mean, you can
see them already. We know that we're going to
expect to find renal corpuscles, Bowman's capsule with the knot
of glomerular capillaries. And, in fact, sure enough,
we can. We know that we could totally
spend time in here looking through and
labeling these in the cortex as either proximal
convoluted tubules or distal convoluted tubules. We also have
some collecting ducts in here that are receiving the filtrate from the distal
convoluted tubule, because the distal
convoluted tubules have to dump in somewhere, and the collecting ducts
start up there. But let's go check
out the medulla. Let's go farther in, and you can see that the nature
of the situation changes. Does it look different
to you here? The medulla is just going
to be a massive line of collecting ducts
and loops of Henle. Can we tell the difference
between the descending and the ascending loop
of Henle is our histo slides? Not going to happen. Can we tell the difference
between the collecting ducts and the loops of Henle
in histo slides? Someone can, I guarantee. We're not going
to do that, either. The direction that we
probably would go is who would you expect
to see in the medulla? Number one, you'd be able to
tell that we're in the medulla, because we see
no renal corpuscles. Number two, we'd be able
to know that medulla is where we're
going to see our loops of Henle, and where we're going to
see pieces of collecting duct. I have one more section to talk
about, the collecting duct, and then that's the end
of this lecture.