BS 1994, James Madison University, Virginia
Lab specialist senior
ws5z@virginia.edu
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I have been a member of the Scrable lab for six years, where I am senior lab specialist. I hold a BS (1994) in biology from James Madison University and have post-baccalaureate training in transgenic mouse technology. I microinject DNA into pronuclear stage mouse embryos and derive the lines of transgenic mice used by members of the laboratory. The focus of my work has been the generation and analysis of one of the key components of the lac system of transgene regulation, the lac repressor mouse. As part of that analysis, I developed a panel of monoclonal antibodies against the lac repressor and mapped where the antibodies bind the antigen. One of the anti-LacI antibodies I developed is being sold by Upstate Biotechnology. The other major focus of my work is to try and understand the role of p53 in normal differentiation and growth. The p53 oncogene is the most frequently mutated gene in human tumors. We have made a regulatable version of p44, a mutation which encodes a truncated version of p53, by embedding lac operators in the promoter. Unregulated expression of p44 is a dose-dependent lethal that causes growth retardation and reproductive deficiencies, but not tumors. We would like to determine how the p44 mutation works by using our regulatable system to shift the window of exposure of the embryo to the deleterious effects of p44 and then comparing the resultant phenotypes. This information will be important in defining those times in embryogenesis and later when normal p53 function is required.
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