Since the pancreatic β-cell apoptosis contributes to impaired insulin secretion in GDM (Zhang et al., 2010[39]; Demirci et al., 2012[12]) and many previous studies showed that down-regulated expression of miR-494-3p can promote apoptosis in kinds of cells (Li et al., 2015[18]; Zhu et al., 2017[42]), we chose miR-494 for further study. This evidence concerns the gene INS and gestational diabetes.