NOS3 and diabetes mellitus: We observed an upregulation of iNOS and a downregulation of eNOS at the protein level in the kidney of diabetic mice, supporting the previous findings, which elucidates that reduced eNOS and elevated iNOS instigate renopathy in diabetes and hypertension (Kumar et al., 2005; Zhao et al., 2006; Balakumar et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2011).