I’m an ichthyologist by training (graduated from the Far Eastern Technical Fisheries University) but my Candidate of Sciences degree (usually reffered to as equivalent of PhD) was stained in genetics so I almost lost the spirit of the classic ichthyology and moved toward the computational molecular evolution approaches. That's a pity.
There are several research directions I am happy to deal with.
A pivotal area of my research focuses on the study of mitochondrial genomes in aquatic organisms. This line of inquiry encompasses the analysis of the structure, function, and evolution of mitochondrial DNA, which is crucial for understanding genetic diversity and evolutionary processes within aquatic ecosystems. The study of mitochondrial genomes in aquatic organisms holds significant importance for biodiversity conservation, fisheries management, and monitoring the health of aquatic ecosystems. The outcomes of these studies aid in making informed decisions in the fields of ecology and natural resource management. Methodology and Approaches: employing advanced genome skimming techniques, analyzing phylogenetic relationships based on mitochondrial data to gain deeper insights into evolutionary linkages among species.
DNA barcoding is a global research program, which now represents one of the largest communities in the field of biological diversity investigation. The standardized molecular genetic techniques coupled with classic morphological methods with all of them relying on the global resource on the documentation of biological diversity (Barcode of Life Data System) made it possible to concentrate the efforts of biodiversity scientists from all over the world. Although we’ve got an independent node (RUS-BOL), DNA barcoding techniques are not actually popular in Russia and doubtfully will be amongst the high national priority research programs in opposite for instance to Canada, Germany or Norway. However, it is clear that Russia with its huge territory has one of the biggest sources of undocumented biological diversity and, hence, provides a great potential to accomplish the main goal of this program. The results we have obtained to date in this direction uncover some issues of species level taxonomic diversity among the perch-like (Actinopterygii: Perciformes) fishes from the Far Eastern Seas of Russia. The Co-1 gene barcode reference library was assembled for 45 species. The analysis showed the existence of cryptic diversity (deeply diverged mitochondrial phylogroups within morphologically identical specimens) inside Lumpenus and Ammodytes genera. Furthermore, we found several pairs of putatively “young” species (morphologically distinct but genetically unresolved). The pilot project on eDNA supported by the foundation of the President of Russian Federation is aimed to develop molecular genetic tools for both targeted species identification (Sakhalin Taimen and Sakhalin Sturgeon) and express biodiversity monitoring in marine and freshwater realms as well as fish larvae feeding ecology.
Forage fish are small pelagic fish (suddenly), which are preyed on by larger predators for food. They are typically feed on plankton, mainly by filter feeding, and have some specific adaptations, which could be recognized in behavior (they form schools) and in the lack of (primary or repeated) adult stage when the switching to fish feeding should normally take place. The only group of the forage fish I have been studying to date is Sand Lances (genus Ammodytes, by the way). The sand lances are small schooling fishes which occupy the shallow marine waters largely affecting the biomass of the coastal marine and terrestrial vertebrate species in the north hemisphere. The strict environmental specificity of sand lances (the preference of clean sandy habitats, pronounced stenothermy) resulted in the restricted gene flow among their different local populations and contributed to the origin of cryptic taxonomic diversity with the lack of discrete morphological characters but maintaining the clear genetic differences. Now I just want to go deeper in the investigation of phylogeographic patterns of the species diversity.