Jan L. Christian

Dr. Christian completed her PhD and postdoctoral training in the Moon lab at the University of Washington where she identified members of the Wnt gene family in Xenopus and showed that they contribute to multiple aspects of embryonic patterning. She started her independent lab at the Oregon Health Sciences University in 1993 and moved to the University of Utah in 2010. Our ongoing studies are discovering novel players in a non-canonical Toll like recptor signaling cascade that is activated by the transmembrane protein, Tril, in early embryos and that functions to concurrently inhibit nodal signaling and boost BMP signaling. We are also deciphering how human mutations in the prodomain of BMP4 and BMP6 lead to congenital defects and to iron overload, respectively. We use genetically modified mice to model these human mutations and use Xenopus as a simple vertebrate model to determine biochemically how prodomain mutations lead to a loss of ligand function.