KCNQ1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus: Also, it was recently shown that one of the type 2 diabetes association signals maps to a part of the KCNQ1 sequence which also encodes a different transcript (KCNQ1OT1) which is known to be an key regulator of other genes in the region, including KCNQ1 itself, but also CDKN1C, a gene already heavily implicated in islet development [23].