Traditional methods of identifying kidney injury, through measurement of blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine, are problematic in that they are slow to detect decreases in glomerular filtration rate (GFR) and are influenced by a variety of factors that are not related to GFR changes. An ideal biomarker of kidney injury would be a substance that the kidney releases immediately in response to damage and that can be detected in the blood or urine without significant metabolism. In recent years, the introduction of high-throughput omics technologies has led to the identification of new biomarkers of renal damage with more favorable test characteristics than creatinine. Advances in this field of research are based on a more detailed understanding of the fundamental biological mechanisms involved in the renal damage progression as well as on advances in genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic researches.

We invite investigators to contribute original research and review articles that provide new insights into molecular pathology underlying the acute and chronic kidney injuries and identify novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Biomarkers of acute and chronic renal damages
• Inflammation-related biomarkers in kidney injury diagnosis and progression
• miRNA as a biomarker of kidney injury progression and therapeutic targets
• Epigenetic biomarkers of renal damage
• Tissue biomarkers for targeted therapy
• Plasma/serum markers of obstructive nephropathy
• Plasma/serum markers for renal injury diagnosis and follow-up

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/bmri/nephrology/emed/ according to the following timetable: