“…Interestingly, accumulating studies have shown that TMAO accelerates the progression of many inflammatory diseases, including cardiovascular disease, CKD, and central nervous system disease, by activating inflammatory pathways, such as the MAPK, NF-κB, and NLRP3 signaling pathways, and then increasing pro-inflammatory molecules, including tumor necrosis factor alpha, IL-6, IL-1β, and IL-18 ( Seldin et al, 2016 ; Sun et al, 2017 ; Geng et al, 2018 ; Zhang et al, 2019 , 2020 ). The NLRP3 inflammasome, which comprises different domains, such as NLRP3, ASC, caspase-1, IL-1β, and IL-18, has been shown to have a crucial role in DKD ( Ram et al, 2020 ), and to be related to renal inflammation and fibrosis ( Alzahrani et al, 2020 ; An et al, 2020 ). One study has shown that NLRP3 knockout in diabetic mice protects against diabetic nephropathy, improves the urine albumin/creatinine ratio, and attenuates glomerular hypertrophy, mesangial expansion, interstitial fibrosis, inflammation, and TGF-β 1 expression ( Wu et al, 2018 ).…”