Andersson grew up inHorndal,Dalarna. Her mother was home care assistant and her father was employed in the wood industry.[6] She studied Biology atUppsala University, since the programme was the only one that had a course aboutDNA. She defended her PhD in molecular biology in 1990, under the supervision ofCharles Kurland.[7] She applied for a postdoctoral stipend fromEMBO to continue her research in the United States, but ended up obtaining a research position at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology inCambridge.[6] She became professor of molecular evolution in 2000, at the Uppsala University's Evolutionary Biology Center.[6] She was elected at theRoyal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2005.[2]
Andersson has been very active in developing the Swedish national center for large-scale researchScience for Life Laboratory, especially itsDNA sequencing andbioinformatics platforms. She served as Co-director for the center between 2017 and 2021.[5]
Andersson's research first focused around the role of codon usage in shaping bacterial genomes.[10] After her postdoctoral fellowship, she contributed to sequence one of the first genome of an obligate intracellular parasite,Rickettsia prowazekii, the causative agent of epidemic typhus.[11]
In her later career, her research continued to explore bacteria and their relationships with their different hosts.[12] In particular, she is interested in the genomic consequences of long-term associations of intracellular bacteria.[13] She explored the evolution ofBartonella,[14]Wolbachia,[15] andPlanctomycetota,[16] among others.
Andersson has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles, and has anh-index of 61, as of 2022.[17]
2002 - Letterstedtska prize for very significant investigation, among others for"an article in Nature (1998), which reports the whole genome sequence of the intracellular parasite Rickettsia prowazekii".[18]
^Sällström, B; Andersson, SG (October 2005). "Genome reduction in the alpha-Proteobacteria".Current Opinion in Microbiology.8 (5):579–85.doi:10.1016/j.mib.2005.08.002.PMID16099701.
