Longlong Yang

Longlong Yang is a graduate student with Dr. Brian Wiegmann at North Carolina State University. He has a M.S. degree in Entomology from the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, with a thesis on systematics of the Tachinidae (Diptera) of Southern China. He also has experience in systematics and biology of Agromyzidae, pollination ecology and behavior of Osmia bees, and species diversity of insects in the tropical rainforests of China.

Longlong began his research assistantship in July, 1996. He is investigating the higher level phylogenetic relationships of the Therevidae using nucleotide sequence data in Brian Wiegmann's lab at NCSU. He has successfully extracted DNA from several genera and used PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to amplify nuclear and mitochondrial genes for preliminary nucleotide sequence comparisons at the genus level.

Mr. Yang accompanied Mike Irwin, Don Webb, and the other four graduate student dipterists to Guatemala in May 1997. Upon returning to the US, he joined the other students for a week in Illinois at the Irwin lab. While there, all participants reported on their progress on the therevid PEET project. Dr. Irwin presented the phylogenetic relationship of the family Therevidae at subfamily and tribe levels based on morphology. Mr. Shaun Winterton introduced his research on dissection of the internal structure of female terminalia and their phylogenetic significance. Mr. Yang demonstrated the primary phylogenetic relationship of 20 therevid genera and two outgroups using nucleotides of approximately 300 base pairs in length of 28S rDNA. In addition, he labeled all the individuals that were collected by in Guatemala and kept in 95% ethanol for molecular studies. A total of 36 individuals belonging to four genera were identified. Collection records were also input in therevid databases.

Yang also traveled to meetings of the North American Dipterists Society and the Entomological Society of America in 1997. He prepared poster presentations for the NCSU Entomology departmental retreat and the NSF PEET meeting in Woods Hole, MA in 1998. He entered the student paper competition for the Presidents Prize in the Entomological Society of America at the 1999 meeting in Atlanta Georgia, with his talk "Phylogenetics of the stiletto flies (Diptera: Therevidae): Combined evidence from gene sequences and morphology. His Ph.D. thesis entitled: Higher-level Molecular Systematics of the Family Therevidae (Diptera) is nearing completion.