Centre for Integrative Genetics (CIGENE)

Professor, Director

Social insect research:  While still living from my farm my main research interest in addition to the dynamics of conceptual systems and the conceptual structure of Darwinism was to understand basic dynamic features of the honeybee society based on mathematical modeling. The main question I addressed was how can a group of individual bees, each having a very narrow information horizon, be capable of coming up with the beautiful colony-level adaptations we observe. This led me to data-driven mathematical modelling of biophysical processes associated with thermoregulation, elucidation of the regulatory processes underlying various population dynamic patterns and the regulatory processes underlying the dramatic differences in longevity patterns of individual bees.

As a paid academic scientist I started to work as an experimental biologist on honeybees. On a low cost budget my lab contributed to the protocol base for making the honeybee a suitable laboratory animal involving development of new equipment for collecting eggs, flight room technology, protocols for in vitro rearing of honeybee larvae, protocols for nuclear transplantation, and cryopreservation of germ plasm. Parts of this protocol base made it possible to develop to RNAi based gene targeting on honeybee embryos and adults and to contribute to the detection of the sex locus of honeybees. In the last phase of my honeybee research period the lab combined mathematical modeling with experimental techniques to elucidate the regulatory mechanisms underlying the facultative age determination system of honeybees in a life history context and by this establish the honeybee as a model system for ageing. The lab is now taken over by my former student Gro Amdam who has in a very short time succeeded in establishing a very strong research programme here at Aas as well as at University of Arizona.

Mathematical biology:  In parallel with my honeybee research I established in the early 90’s a collaboration with Erik Plahte on the modeling of gene regulatory networks. This led to the first mathematical proof of the necessity of a positive feedback loop for multistationarity, a new mathematical framework for describing dynamic systems containing switchlike dose-response regulatory relationships, specific models of the iron metabolism in mammals and the regulatory machinery underlying melanogenic switching in melanocytes. We also started on what has now become a main preoccupation, namely to bridge system dynamics with genetics theory in order to get a quantitative genetics theory based on how genes actually work and interact.