CircRNAs, which used to be considered by-products of transcription, have now been accepted as versatile regulators of numerous physiological processes, including insulin secretion, neurogenesis, cartilage degradation among others (Hansen et al., 2013; Xu et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2016), as well as pathological abnormalities, such as diabetes, neurological disorders, cardiovascular diseases, chronic inflammatory diseases, and cancer, etc. (Holdt et al., 2016; Li et al., 2018a; Bai et al., 2018; Fang et al., 2018; Dong et al., 2019). Here, INS is linked to diabetes mellitus.