Question: what sort of things do you like to study about?

Martin Johnsson answered on 16 Mar 2020:

Oh, so many things! That’s one of those luxury problems of research: there are too many interesting things to work on and too little time.

Here are three things I like to work on:

* Chicken bones. I find bone biology fascinating, and weak bones is a huge problem for chickens that lay eggs. I would like to do more work with the genetic basis of bone strength in chickens.

* Damaging mutations. Just by chance, there are random DNA changes every generation, and some of them can cause disease and other problems (in rare unlucky individuals). I’ve done some work with detecting such mutations in pig and cow data, and I would love to do more on this. It leads to lots of interesting questions about how to analyse data and think about genetics.

* What breeding does to the DNA. When we select animals to be the parents of the next generation in a breeding program, we change the DNA of that population, in the long term. But exactly how does it change? Researchers have surprisingly little clue about what sustained selection does, on a detailed level. That’s something I’d love to work more on.