NR3C1 and metabolic disease: Our results agree with the previous notion that GR promoter is highly conserved among mammalian species studied, including human [4], rat [21], mice [26], etc. It is worth noting that pig is more close to human than the rodents in terms of the sequence homology and structure similarity of the GR promoter, implying that pig can serve as a better model, compared to the rodents, for human metabolic diseases related to the dysregulation of GR expression.