The nestor there, professor Hamish Scott was part of one of the teams that in its time described AIRE, and has been involved in research on AIRE for many years. Bergithe Eikeland Oftedal left for Aidelade two months ago to become a part of Hamish's research group this year. Here in Bergen she is part of the research group Endocrine Medicine.

At SA Pathology, they are studying AIRE KO mice, that is, mice that are missing the AIRE gene. Hamish's group is not very large. Only one other person works on the same project as her. In short, the goal of the project is to clean a subtype of cells from the thymus that expresses AIRE, both from wild type (WT) mice and AIRE KO mice. RNA sequencing is used in order to see if interferon genes in particular are regulated by the AIRE gene or not. The researchers here are highly skilled at "next-generation sequencing". Her task is to analyze deep sequence data from T cell repectors from AIRE KO mice and WT mice. In addition, she will generate and analyze the equivalent data from patient materials from Addison's patients and APS I patients.