GJA1 and diabetic kidney disease: Using human datasets of renal transcriptomic data available on the Nephroseq repository (Fig. 1A-C), [25–27] we assessed the expression of Cx43 in healthy (n = 5) and diseased (n = 48) kidneys (IgA nephropathy, membranous nephropathy, lupus nephritis, minimal change nephrotic syndrome, membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis, amyloidosis, antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody-related glomerulonephropathy, diabetic nephropathy and other nephropathies) as encoded by GJA1 gene expression (Fig. 1a) and correlated this to parameters of renal function (Fig. 1b, c).