MTOR and chronic kidney disease: More importantly, to verify whether autophagy relies on TFEB, we further knocked out TFEB in HK2 cells and tubular epithelial cells in mice, and the results showed that the improvement induced by trehalose treatment was remarkably abrogated by TFEB knockdown in HK2 cells and mice, indicating that the protective role of trehalose in CKD relied on the mTOR-TFEB axis.