Faculty

Andy carried out his PhD studies in the laboratory of Dr. Joan Brugge at The State University of New York in Stony Brook (now known as Stony Brook University) studying the role of tyrosine phosphorylation in human platelets. He then moved to The California Institute of Technology where he fell in love with C. elegans while training with Dr. Paul Sternberg. After his post-doc, Andy worked at NCI in Frederick Maryland for 5 years, where he first got interested in cell cycle regulation in C. elegans. He moved to the NIH campus in late 1999 to start his own lab as a tenure track investigator. There he worked on the Ananphase-Promoting Complex and the Spindle Assembly Checkpoints in C. elegans. He was awarded tenure in 2007 and promoted to Senior Investigator. Most recently, Andy's lab has switched their focus to modeling rare human diseases in C. elegans.

• Golden A. (2017) From phenologs to silent suppressors: Identifying potential therapeutic targets for human disease. Mol Reprod Dev84(11):1118-1132.
• Kim S, Twigg SRF, Scanlon VA, Chandra A, Hansen TJ, Alsubait A, Fenwick AL, McGowan SJ, Lord H, Lester T, Sweeney E, Weber A, Cox H, Wilkie AOM, Golden A, Corsi AK. (2017) Localized TWIST1 and TWIST2 basic domain substitutions cause four distinct human diseases that can be modeled in Caenorhabditis elegans. Hum Mol Genet.26(11):2118-2132.

• Currently there are no job openings.

Our lab models rare human monogenic diseases in C. elegans. It has been estimated that ~60% of genes associated with rare diseases have C. elegans orthologs. Once we identify such an ortholog, we use CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to delete the entire gene to determine the null phenotype. We also tag it with GFP or mCherry to determine its expression pattern throughout development. Next, we make missense alleles to mimic specific patient alleles. We characterize the mutant phenotypes associated with these alleles with the goal of carrying out suppressors screens to identify other interacting factors that could potentially serve as therapeutic targets for the human disease. Our lab currently consists of three highly talented post-bacs and two outstanding post-docs.