Secondly to provide further validation of our approach, we reversed the approach and tested 21 genes (ADAMTS9, CDKAL1, CDKN2B, FTO, GCK, GCKR, HHEX, HNF1B, IGF2BP2, IRS1, JAZF1, KCNJ11, KCNQ1, MTNR1B, NOTCH2, PPARG, SLC30A8, TCF7L2, THADA, TSPAN8 and WFS1) located in vicinity of 26 known SNPs associated with T2DM and related traits [2,5,6,10-13] for their expression in the same data sets. Here, HHEX is linked to type 2 diabetes mellitus.