Story 5: Mykola Drohvalenko, Ph.D. student

Mykola Drohvalenko is a Ph.D. student at the Zoology and Animal Ecology department of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine. Before that, he completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s in zoology in this university.

“My Ph.D. focuses on the genetic processes occurring in the water frog, Pelophylax esculentus complex,” he says. “These animals have a unique reproduction mode known very little among all the studied living organisms – hemiclonal reproduction. It consists of selective elimination of certain parental genomes from germ cell lines in interspecies hybrids. It leads to the formation of various types of gametes, various types of hybridogenesis, and various ways these hybrids can evolve.” 

In his lab, he focuses mostly on artificial crossings, analyzing the parents, offspring, and population compositions using methods of genetics, cytology, morphology, and more.

Unfortunately, Drohvalenko’s research projects were put on hold in the past year because of the war. In particular, on March 1, 2022, his department was damaged by a shockwave after two Russian cruise missiles hit a building nearby, that of the Kharkiv Regional Council. “Almost no windows survived,” he says. “Collections, including centuries-old, and valuable equipment were evacuated, disassembled to be hidden, or transferred to other cities and even abroad; my colleagues had to save their lives.”

Due to inability to proceed with research, he had to put his PhD-course on hold without the stipend, and this hold continues to the present day. Besides the laboratory work in university, he had done a range of jobs before full-scale war, including data search, translation and copywriting, which were lost soon after invasion started. They helped him gain “a set of skills”, which he hopes to benefit by in the future.