Doctor of Philosophy in Biology

in the 

School of Biological Sciences

Yuehui Zhao

will defend his dissertation

Identification of the genetic and phenotypic basis of adaptation to new food sources

Friday, March 15, 2019

1:00 PM

EBB 1005 Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Seminar Room

950 Atlantic Drive

Thesis Advisor:

Dr. Patrick McGrath

School of Biological Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

Committee members: 

Dr. Joe Lachance

School of Biological Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Frank Rosenzweig

School of Biological Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Eric Gaucher

Department of Biology

Georgia State University

Dr. Levi Morran

Department of Biology

Emory University

Summary

The ability to obtain energy from natural environments is of fundamental importance to an animal’s survival and depends on both finding food and metabolizing it into a useful molecular source of energy. As organisms encounter new environments, feeding strategies and metabolic networks can be out of balance with new potential dietary sources, creating evolutionary pressure for animals to adapt. In my doctoral thesis, I studied two how two laboratory strains of C. elegans, N2 and LSJ2, adapted to new food sources. I will first describe my finding that how the pleiotropic traits of two derived alleles of neural genes npr-1 and glb-5 in N2 regulate fitness effects to adapt to the new food source. Second, I will describe my finding that identification of a beneficial de novo complex genomic rearrangements at rcan-1 gene, an ortholog of human Down Syndrome correlated gene RCAN1/DSCR1. This complex rearrangement provides animal another strategy to adapt to the new food source. In the last part, I will describe the work to identify the adaptive alleles and their fitness effects under different environments including three different feeding conditions, two different temperatures, and the growth condition with anthelmintic drugs. My doctoral thesis research demonstrates that laboratory evolution can serve as a powerful tool to study the genetic and phenotypic basis that regulate fitness in metazoan.