Golden graduated from MUW in two years, after which she was offered a position in the first cohort of trainees in a NIH-financed doctoral program in genetics at the University of Missouri.
While at Texas A&M, Golden became interested in studying circadian rhythms after her first encounter with Carl H. Johnson and Takao Kondo, with whom she would go on to discover the Kai complex.
[3] Golden began her graduate career with Louis A. Sherman, where she used genetics to research the proteins in photosynthetic complexes of the cyanobacteria Synechoccus elongatus.
Golden was the first to demonstrate that a mutant allele of the psbA gene is sufficient to confer herbicide resistance in cyanobacteria.
[2] Other research later confirmed that this gene coded for a protein integral to the Photosystem II complex involved in photosynthesis.
In 1989, Golden's team discovered that the specific psbA allele expressed by cyanobacteria depended on the lighting conditions in which the colony was grown.
[5] This finding led her to investigate more generally how light influences expression of photosynthetic genes in the organism[6] and contributes to the overall understanding of bacterial responses to environmental input.
This technique drew the interest of chronobiologist Carl H. Johnson, with whom Golden would go on to collaborate and eventually discover the KaiABC complex .
She transformed Synechococcus elongatus, one of the better studied cyanobacteria species, with a luciferase reporter gene and showed circadian rhythm in bioluminescence.
When Golden mutated the gene cikA, the clock was functional but could not be reset, resulting in the bacterial equivalent of permanent jet lag.