Scientific Programs

Kate Walton

Kate Walton joined our laboratory in the summer of 1999. She obtained her B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1995 and a M.S. from Rutgers University in 1998. Kate's first project in LGP was helping to set up the mammary gland microarrays. In collaboration with Pete Lemkin at the NCI Laboratory of Experimental and Computational Biology (LECB), Kate helped set up the MicroArrayExplorer, an "exploratory data analysis facility for cDNA microarrays". In her subsequent project, Kate examined the mammary gland phenotype in mice in which the Bcl-x gene had been deleted specifcially in the mammary epithelium and determined that deletion of this anti-apoptotic factor lead to faster programmed cell death during involution.

Kate left our laboratory in 2001 to become a Ph.D. student at Duke University in the Department of Biology in the Developmental Cell and Molecular Biology Program. Kate works in the lab of Dr. David McClay whose lab studies morphogenesis in early embryonic development and examines how tissue layers are established and form patterns and boundaries. This work is a small part of a huge collaborative project, the final aim to elucidate how all of the signaling pathways converge into a network that defines endodermal and mesodermal specification. Specifically, Kate is interested and actively involved in how endoderm patterning is established and how endoderm and mesoderm separate.

Publications while in LGP

PubMed search

1. Cui, Y., Li, M., Walton, K.D., Sun, K., Hanover, J.A., Furth, P.A. and Hennighausen, L. (2001). The Stat3/5 locus encodes novel endoplasmic reticulum and helicase-like proteins that are preferentially expressed in normal and neoplastic mammary tissue. Genomics 78:129-134

2. Walton, K.D., Wagner, K.U., Rucker, E.B. 3rd, Shillingford, J.M., Miyoshi, K. and Hennighausen, L. (2001). Conditional deletion of the bcl-x gene from mouse mammary epithelium results in accelerated apoptosis during involution but does not compromise cell function during lactation. Mech Dev. 109:281-293.

3. Lemkin, P.F., Thornwall, G.C., Walton, K.D. and Hennighausen, L. (2000). The microarray explorer tool for data mining of cDNA microarrays: application for the mammary gland. Nucleic Acids Res. 28:4452-4459.

4. Stegalkina, S.S., Guerrero, A., Walton, K.D., Liu, X., Robinson, G.W. and Hennighausen, L. (2000). Transcription originating in the long terminal repeats of the endogenous mouse mammary tumor virus MTV-3 is activated in Stat5a-null mice and picks up hitchhiking exons. J Virol. 73:8669-8676.

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