What Do Chernobyl’s Stray Dogs and ‘Jurassic Park’ Have in Common? Ask This Up-And-Coming Population Geneticist

Very few graduate students have their research make international headlines, let alone before their dissertation is complete, but it’s easy to understand why Megan Dillon’s work has captured global imaginations.

The Chernobyl — known in Ukrainian as “Chornobyl” — nuclear disaster continues to fascinate scientists and laypeople alike nearly 40 years after the nuclear power plant’s Unit Four reactor exploded, releasing a catastrophic amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere. The 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the plant remains uninhabitable to this day — by humans, at least. 

This geographic peculiarity is where Dillon’s work lives. For nearly five years, the NC State genetics researcher and newly minted Dr. Dillon, Ph.D. has worked with College of Veterinary Medicine professor Dr. Matthew Breen to study the genetic makeup of stray dogs that have called the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or CEZ, home for over 30 generations post-accident.

In a landmark 2023 study, the research team discovered evidence of genetic differences between canine populations living in two distinct areas of the CEZ, suggesting Chernobyl’s dogs could have adapted to chemical and environmental exposures over generations. 

The publication generated sensational headlines about Chernobyl’s “mutant hounds” developing nuclear “superpowers” — a creative interpretation of the science, Dillon says. Learning how to contextualize her research and communicate it to the public amid this media attention has been an unexpected benefit of being an NC State Genetics and Genomics Scholar.

The way Dillon sees it, the truth of her Chernobyl research and the guiding principle of her interest in conservation genetics are best summarized by fictional mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm in the bestselling novel and cinema blockbuster “Jurassic Park”: “Life finds a way.” 

A recent awardee of the William R. Atchley Research Award at NC State’s annual Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics Graduate Student Research Symposium, soon-to-be Dr. Dillon hopes to continue building a career around studying how various animal populations find ways to survive species-threatening circumstances. Pinpointing how these groups recover from potential extinction events not only is critical to protecting the world’s biodiversity, Dillon says, but also can provide insight on how human populations can adapt to changing environments.

“There are climate and contamination disasters happening all over the world, and if it comes on too fast or there’s not enough underlying genetic diversity, there’s not much the population there can do about it,” Dillon says. “But if the situations and circumstances are just right, you can have this really interesting evidence of rapid evolution and local adaptation and selection.”

Scientific Globe-Trotter

A native of Virginia Beach, Virginia, Dillon was introduced to genetics through an undergraduate course at Randolph-Macon College. Diving deeper into DNA made everything she’d learned about evolution and adaptation click.

“It was just so exciting being able to look and find the exact piece of the puzzle that could explain a difference in phenotype in populations or in individuals,” Dillon says.

In college, Dillon majored in biology and worked on various genetics studies primarily researching environmental DNA related to different fish species. She analyzed biodiversity within endemic African barb populations in the Fouta Djallon highlands of Guinea, West Africa, and updated an assay to detect invasive rusty crayfish in central Pennsylvania’s Juniata River watershed. Her final project evaluated the GPR56 protein’s impact on fertility in mice.

She knew she wanted to study genetics at a higher level as she approached graduation in 2020. The Genetics & Genomics Scholars Ph.D. program piqued her interest because it lets students explore different life sciences programs before deciding where to focus their research.

“I met Dr. Breen before I moved here, and we chatted via Zoom about a potential rotation project,” Dillon says. “When he presented the dogs of Chernobyl as an option to me, I was sold.”

Dillon admits that most of her prior knowledge about Chernobyl came from watching the eponymous HBO miniseries. She had, however, heard about animals reclaiming the CEZ in the absence of human habitation and wanted to learn how these Ukrainian wild dogs survived a contaminated environment.

Her five-year study started by mapping DNA variations detected in canine blood samples provided by collaborators at Columbia University and the Clean Futures Fund, a group that oversees the dogs’ veterinary care. Dillon, Breen and the research team created the first demographic profile of the pups, which showed that the CEZ’s two major canine populations seldom interbreed.

Then the international research group published its discovery suggesting generational genetic adaptation, prompting the “radiation hound” headlines. Further research released in December 2024 clarified that the genetic differences were not due to mutation, radioactive or otherwise, but could be tied to natural selective breeding — meaning dogs that had genetically hardier traits survived long enough to pass on those characteristics.

“I think the media attention can be a good way to disperse this information to the broader public and get some nonscientists really interested in science and understanding what we do,” says Dillon, who also studied pathogen prevalence in ticks found on Chernobyl’s mutts. “This helps bridge that gap.”

Spirit of Collaboration

To this day, Dillon still hasn’t set foot in Chernobyl. Due to a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, Dillon was unable to conduct research in the CEZ.

It’s thanks to collaborators from the CFF, the University of South Carolina and Columbia University that the project came to fruition, Dillon says. Funding from the CFF, Triangle Center for Evolutionary Medicine and NC State CVM Cancer Genomics Fund supported it all.

The dedication and zeal that Dillon brought to the Chernobyl projects are two of many qualities that make her an impressive early-career geneticist, says Breen, the Oscar J. Fletcher Distinguished Professor in Comparative Oncology Genetics.

This post was originally published in Veterinary Medicine News.