Guro Katrine Sandvik

I am a physiologist/molecular biologist with a special interest for CRISPR genome editing. I got my Ph.D. in physiology at the Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo in 2012. I have been working with many different fish species, and in many different fields, ranging from anoxia-related research to puberty and early development. In the latest year I have worked with setting up a CRISPR platform for adult mouse brain at the University of Oslo. I am now employed in an associate professor tenure track position at CIGENE, Department of Animal and Aquacultural Sciences, and are working on developing the CRISPR methodology in fish. 

CRISPR is a revolutionizing technique that can be used to knock out genes in essentially any organism. Recent development of the technique in model species like mouse, rat and zebrafish also enables control of gene transcription, base editing, tagging of genes, conditional editing, etc. However, in the non-model species as salmon and tilapia, these techniques are not available. I aim to transfer ideas and protocols for advanced CRISPR methodology from model species to fish, especially salmon. This will open up new opportunities for studying the function of all genes in salmon especially, but also in other fish.

Through sequencing, researchers from CIGENE have discovered many loci that is associated with different traits in salmon. The function of these genes are often not known. I will focus on finding the function of the genes in these loci, using novel CRISPR tools as CRISPR transcriptional control, CRISPR interference, etc.