We are particularly grateful to Dr Fen Zhang (Department of Endocrine, Tongren Hospital, Beijing, China) for providing the MIN6 cells and Dr. Lixin Zheng (Laboratory of Immunology, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA) for providing plasmids coding HVEM-Ig, LTβR-Ig and N66F-Ig. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81170695 and 81570703), and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, China (14JJ3104).