The Centre for Integrative Genetics (CIGENE) was formally established in 2003 at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences at campus Aas 30 km southeast of Oslo. It is a campus-wide undertaking with contributions from the Department of Animal and Aquacultural Sciences, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Department of Mathematics and Technology, and Department of Chemistry, Food and Biotechnology. The UMB University Board voted in June 2010 to accord CIGENE the status of ”Strategic Research Centre” at Campus Ås.
CIGENE aims to contribute to a deep causal understanding of complex genetic characters in fish, plants and animals for scientific and commercial exploitation based on a conceptual and methodological integration of nonlinear system dynamics, mathematical statistics, biological theory, biological physics, and genomic and phenotypic data.
Our Concept
The search for principles and methodologies that link the behaviours of molecules (i.e. genes) to system characteristics and functions (i.e. phenotypes) has been the prime occupation of genetics for the last 100 years. To pay due credit to the immense efforts and achievements of the genetics community and the fact that very much of modern interdisciplinary biological research addresses old disciplinary goals of genetics, while at the same time recognizing that genetics research is undergoing a dramatic transition conceptually, methodologically and technologically, we have coined the term integrative genetics.
