NOS3 and diabetes mellitus: We have shown that diabetes-associated upregulation of the iNOS and eNOS mRNA and protein expression (Figure 4), described in the previous section, correlated with significantly higher mRNA transcript levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-α (tumor necrosis factor alpha) and IL-1β (interleukin 1 beta) by 3.5- and 2.2-fold, respectively (Figures 6A,B).