As an inner layer of glomerular filtration barrier, GECs impairment has been proved to be correlated with the urinary albumin creatinine ratio (Toyoda et al., 2007; Weil et al., 2012), which happened before podocytes and GBM damage in rodent and human diabetes (Jeansson et al., 2006; Broekhuizen et al., 2010). The gene discussed is ALB; the disease is diabetes mellitus.