Yuheng is an evolutionary geneticist who seeks to understand how organisms respond to changing environments. He’s used experimental populations (Drosophila melanogaster) to examine the effects of temporally and spatially varying environments on different aspects of populations, including genomic diversity, quantitative genetic variance, adaptability and transcriptomic plasticity. He studies the evolution of gene expression abundance and alternative splicing in three pairs of warm- and cold-adapted populations (African Drosophila melanogaster). He is interested in the level of parallelism in gene expression evolution for cold adaptation. The regulatory effects of divergences are further separated into cis- and trans- effect. He is also interested in the plasticity and canalization of expression abundance and splicing in these populations. Finally, he is mapping the QTLs underlying the parallel cold adaptation using bulk segregant analysis and recombine inbred lines.
