ACTA1 and diabetes mellitus: Investigators in most studies addressed the first two described key events of the EMT process by analysing, in different tubular epithelial cell lines or podocytes, the reduction of epithelial markers (E/P-cadherin and/or ZO-1) and the induction of mesenchymal proteins (α-SMA and/or vimentin) after 48–72 h of stimulation with TGF-β1, high glucose, or other triggers of diabetes [12,25,27,28,29,43,46,52,53,54,55,56,57].