Fibronectin accumulation in glomerulosclerotic lesions: self-assembly sites and the heparin II binding domain.

Background: Glomerulosclerosis is a severe complication of many immunologically-mediated kidney diseases, eventually resulting in loss of renal function. In chronic graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) in mice, a model for human lupus nephritis, the end-stage sclerotic lesions were previously shown to contain large amounts of fibronectin (FN). This study investigated a domain-specific accumulation process of circulating plasma FN (pFN) in sclerotic lesions.