Örjan Carlborg

About Örjans research

I am a Computational Geneticist with a particular interest in adaptation. Adaptation is the process where the genetics of an organism are changed to be fitter in a given environment. On a short time scale, adaptation is a way for a species to cope with changing life conditions. To understand the genetics underlying such changes, I study how plants adapt to climate change and agricultural breeding has adapted wild plants and animals to become domestic crops and livestock. To understand more about the genetic mechanisms that contribute to these processes, I do experiments and test hypotheses on the computer. Core activities in my research are therefore both the development of new models, methods and tools to analyze experimental data, as well as analysing and interpreting data using these new approaches. The data is sometimes collected by us, but most often by others. We are now in the middle of a biological data revolution, where new ways to characterize living organisms in molecular detail are emerging at a very rapid pace. This makes it very exciting to be working in computational genetics and I already today look forward to exploring what tomorrow’s data will tell us about the adaptive processes that have happened in the past!