To understand the molecular functions of the urinary bladder, researchers including scientists from The Human Protein Atlas project have recently defined the expression of elevated genes in the bladder.

The main function of the urinary bladder is to store the urine made by the kidneys, allowing urination voluntarily. The urothelium also plays an important role in preventing rupture of urine storage and leakage of toxic urinary substances into the blood.

In the current study, the gene expression pattern of the bladder was compared to the gene expression of a large set of other normal human tissues using both genome-wide deep RNA sequencing analysis and subsequent immunohistochemistry analysis to provide spatial information in the different compartments of the bladder. The researchers found 90 protein-coding genes that were elevated in the urinary bladder, either as enhanced expression uniquely in the urinary bladder or as elevated expression together with at least one other tissue. Twenty of these 90 proteins were localized to the whole urothelium, four proteins were found specifically in the umbrella cells of the bladder, and three in the intermediate/basal cells.

Two thirds of all elevated genes have not previously been described in the context of urinary bladder and the corresponding proteins are therefore interesting targets for more in-depth studies.

Read the whole story in PlosOne.

Explore some of the elevated genes in the Human Protein Atlas:

UPK1A

UPK2

UPK3A

UPK3BL

KRT17