The advent of in vitro culture techniques has enabled the culture of homogeneous populations of glomerular mesangial and epithelial cells to aid our understanding of the development of glomerular disease at the cellular level. Advances in our knowledge of the pathogenic mechanisms have made it clear that the response of intrinsic glomerular cells to external stimuli plays an important role in glomerular injury (1 ,2 ). Glomerular cells from several mammalian species have been isolated and propagated, and, in some instances, cell lines have been generated by viral or nonviral oncogenic transformation (3 -5 ).
