Abstracts of the 2020 Meeting of the Tennessee Academy of Science

Detecting selection: What can amino acid changes tell us about evolution? Dr. Yampolsky earned a BS in Biology from Moscow State University and a PhD in Genetics from the Russian Academy of Sciences. He held postdoctoral appointments at Northern Illinois University, Cornell University, University of Georgia, and University of Maryland/NIST. He has been a faculty member at Eastern Tennessee State University since 2001. His major research interest is in the area of the evolution of gene expression in response to changes in the environment (temperature, nutrients, xenobiotics) or genetic background (chromosomal aberrations, gene duplications). Differential gene expression is the molecular basis of phenotypic plasticity. Dr. Yampolsky investigates the role of adaptation and environmental constraints in the shaping of differential gene expression. Does plastic gene expression impede adaptive evolution or provide a new target for selection? If plasticity of gene expression is lost in a constant environment, does it occur by neutral processes or by selection operating through across-environmental trade-offs? He attempts to answer these and other questions using microarray and RNAseq technology as well as bioinformatics. His study organisms include Drosophila, Daphnia, and Lake Baikal (Siberia) endemic crustaceans.