Podocyte injury resulting from a loss of differentiation is the hallmark of many glomerular
diseases. We previously showed that retinoic acid (RA) induces podocyte differentiation via
stimulation of the cAMP pathway. However, many podocyte maturity markers lack binding
sites for RA-response element or cAMP-response element (CREB) in their promoter regions.
We hypothesized that transcription factors induced by RA and downstream of CREB mediate
podocyte differentiation. We performed microarray gene expression studies in human …