Lyudmila N. Trut is head of the research group at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Novosibirsk. She received her doctoral degree in 1980. Her current research interests are the patterns of evolutionary transformations at the early steps of animal domestication. Her research group is developing the problem of domestication as an evolutionary event with the use of experimental models, including the silver fox, the American mink, the river otter and the wild gray rat. Address: Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 630090 Novosibirsk 90, Russia. Internet: iplysn@bionet.nsc.ru.