Today approximately 537 million adults are living with diabetes. Worse still is that this figure is expected to rise to about 640 million by the year 2030. Factors like metabolic stress drive the development of this condition. The loss of functional β-cell mass due to these stressors is linked to the pathogenesis of diabetes. There are multiple gene expression changes that occur as a result of these stressors. The studying of these genetic variations in β-cells can lead to a greater understanding of diabetes as well as potential cures. CRISPR-Cas9 is a powerful tool for creating gene knockouts for the purpose of studying heterogeneity. As a result, we created a CRISPR guide-RNA library for the rat pancreatic islet β-cell insulinoma (INS-1) cell line. This library will be used to perform genome-wide forward genetic screens under conditions of glucolipotoxicity, proliferation, and insulin secretion of all expressed genes in the INS-1 cell line. Here we present the state of our guide-RNA library development and forward progressive screens.