Research Programme

The CIGENE research programme represents a mix of theory-directed explanatory research, instrumental research, and explanatory instrumental research involving mathematics, statistics, informatics and high-throughput and high-resolution functional genomics technologies. By combining these approaches under one umbrella, we think we will be able to establish the kind of intellectual environment needed to meet the scientific and practical expectations attached to the CIGENE mission.

The three types of research
By theory-directed explanatory research we mean intellectually driven research with a focus on (i) understanding how and why biological phenomena behave as they do and (ii) developing and understanding mathematical structures of potential importance for biology. By instrumental research we mean application-focused work that ignores the reasons for phenomena in favour of using new knowledge to obtain certain practical goals. By instrumental explanatory research we mean applications-oriented research with the pursuit of fundamental understanding.

Current activities
These include making of SNP-maps in cattle, detection and validation of >2000 genomewide SNPs on Atlantic salmon, finemapping of a promising QTL in cattle, work on salmon filet colour as a proof of principle trait concerning integration of the whole CIGENE toolbox, development of new haplotyping and QTL fine mapping techniques, combining nonlinear system dynamics and statistical genetics in a virtual genome platform, development of analytical techniques for studying regulatory systems with steep dose-response relationship, development of multivariate techniques for classification and analysis of high-resolution phenotypic data, making use of control engineering tools to model regulatory systems, and making of a conceptual bridge between regulatory biology and classical genetics by use of nonlinear system dynamics.