Highlights of the 2nd International Symposium on Tribbles and Diseases: tribbles tremble in therapeutics for immunity, metabolism, fundamental cell biology and cancer

The Tribbles(TRIB) family of pseudokinase proteins has been shown to play key roles in cell cycle, metabolic diseases, chronic inflammatory disease, and cancer development. A better understanding of the mechanisms of TRIB pseudokinases could provide new insights for disease development and help promote TRIB proteins as novel therapeutic targets for drug discovery. At the 2 nd International Symposium on Tribbles and Diseases held on May 7–9, 2018 in Beijing, China, a group of leading Tribbles scientists reported their findings and ongoing studies about the effects of the different TRIB proteins in the areas of immunity, metabolism, fundamental cell biology and cancer. Here, we summarize important and insightful overviews from 4 keynote lectures, 13 plenary lectures and 8 short talks that took place during this meeting. These findings may offer new insights for the understanding of the roles of TRIB pseudokinases in the development of various diseases.

Targeted Mutagenesis of Duplicated Genes in Caenorhabditis elegans Using CRISPR-Cas9

CRISPR （clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats）-Cas9-based genome editing has revolutionized func- tional genomics in many biological research fields. The specificity and potency of CR1SPR-Cas9 genome editing make it ideal for investigating the function of genes in vivo （Hsu et al., 2014）. Gene duplication is a key driver of evolu- tionary novelty （Taylor and Raes, 2004）. However, duplicated genes with near-identical sequences and functional redun- dancy have posed challenges for genetic analysis （Woollard, 2005）. The functions of duplicated genes can be assessed by simultaneous knockdown using homology-based methods such as RNA interference （RNAi） （Tischler et al., 2006）, Generation of double or triple mutants is an alternative way to assess functional redundancy of duplicated genes, However, generation of such compound mutants by forward or reverse genetic methods is time consuming.