What is glomerular filtration?
Glomerular filtration is the first step in urine formation. You see, in order to clean out the blood, you have to have a way of accessing it. And what we clean out is the plasma (not the cells). So, in glomerular filtration, a lot of the blood plasma spills out into the glomerular capsule. This picture (kind of like the one I drew in class) illustrates what is happening inside the renal corpuscle. Blood comes to the kidney via the renal artery, branches into the smaller and smaller arteries you learned about in lab, and eventually into the afferent arteriole. The afferent arteriole feeds into the glomerulus, providing the blood for the glomerular capillaries. As the blood travels through these capillaries, filtration (similar to what we saw with systemic capillaries) causes a lot of the plasma contents to spill out. When they spill out of the glomerular capillaries, though, they end up within the glomerular capsule. The glomerular capsule is continuous with the rest of the renal tubule
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