In previous work from our group, we showed that puerarin, the active compound of radix puerariae and a traditional Chinese herbal medicine, exerts renoprotective effects in a mouse model of streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes with endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) deficiency, which mimics the effects of advanced human DN (Li et al., 2017). The gene discussed is NOS3; the disease is diabetes mellitus.