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During the congress, E-Posters will be accessible to all participants on the congress website 24/7, as well as in the E-poster stations in the congress center.
Preparing your E-Poster
Please review the E-Poster format requirements carefully when preparing your E-Poster. Should your E-Poster not meet the mentioned requirements, it may not be displayed as described above.
E-Poster Submission Deadline
Please prepare and upload your E-Poster no later than March 14, 2026 11.59PM CET. After this date, you will no longer be able to prepare and upload your E-poster and it will not be displayed and accessible on the congress website.
Please follow the instructions below to input your abstract title.
Abstract titles should be brief and reflect the content of the abstract.
Living kidney donation is an important source of kidneys for transplantation in many countries of the world. After donation, the remaining kidney undergoes adaptive remodeling. Little is known about the early molecular events that govern this adaptive remodeling. We aimed to gain more insight in these early molecular events.
We performed whole-blood transcriptomic analysis on a cohort of 31 living kidney donors with paired measurements at pre- and 3-months post-donation. We used a systems-biology approach to construct stable transcriptional components (TCs), which are statistically independent latent gene expression programs. These TCs were learned by consensus-independent component analysis, trained on a large compendium of publicly available expression profiles from the ARCHS4 database. Donor transcriptomic data were preprocessed uniformly and were then projected onto the derived TCs. TCs were characterized and mapped onto biological pathways using Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA). Paired t-tests within a multivariate permutation testing framework were used to assess statistical significance of differential activation post-donation. False discovery rate (FDR) was controlled at 0.05 to account for multiple testing.
We analyzed 31 donors with paired whole-blood samples. Age was 57 ± 11 years, 68% were male, and baseline eGFR was 108 ± 19 mL/min/1.73m2. In total, 1262 stable TCs were constructed. Permutation-based, FDR-controlled statistical tests yielded three TCs with altered activation post-donation (Figure 1): TC366 (upregulated, p-value <0.001), TC304 (downregulated, p-value <0.001), and TC719 (downregulated, p-value <0.001). TC366 was driven by the gene ADAM9 and enriched for epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and adipogenesis pathways. This pro-fibrotic activation was accompanied with downregulation of programs associated with apical junction integrity and myogenesis captured by TC719 and TC304, respectively.
Figure 1. Transcriptional components underlying early post-donation adaptation. (A) Hallmark pathway enrichment for the three significantly altered TCs. (B) Gene-TC associations shown as signed –log10(p) from Spearman correlations; left axis shows Ensembl IDs, right axis HGNC symbols. (C) Boxplots of TC activities pre- vs post-donation for each of the TCs.
Our findings reveal a systemic transcriptional signature in response to unilateral nephrectomy that indicates the initiation of an adaptive remodeling program driven by an ADAM9-dependent EMT pathway. Further research is required to investigate how long it takes for this response to resolve and whether unsuccessful resolution has any long-term consequences.
