IL6 and acute kidney injury: Western blot and real-time PCR also detected that renal NPY expression in both mRNA and protein levels was largely reduced in the AKI kidney in a time-dependent manner, which was inversely associated in upregulation of M1 macrophage markers such as iNOS and Mincle and proinflammatory cytokines including IL-1β, TNFα, IL-6, MCP-1 (Figure 1e and Supplementary Figure 2).