News Finding: When the creosote was a new addition to the diet of individual N.bryanti woodrats, they had different reactions.
Paper Finding: The response of the naïve woodrat population to creosote bush was indicative of extreme physiological stress.
News Context: We expected a huge list of genes -- instead we found very few." When the creosote was a new addition to the diet of individual N.bryanti woodrats, they had different reactions. They exhibited signs of severe stress, showing that because they hadn't been exposed to the diet, the genes to detoxify it hadn't been switched on.
Paper Context: Although only one detoxification gene (an aldo-keto reductase) was induced by both experienced populations, these populations converged upon functionally equivalent strategies to biotransform the PSCs of creosote bush by constitutively expressing aldehyde and alcohol dehydrogenases, Cytochromes P450s, methyltransferases, glutathione S-transferases and sulfotransferases. The response of the naïve woodrat population to creosote bush was indicative of extreme physiological stress. Major evolutionary dietary shifts seem to be enabled by an underlying change in biotransformation enzymes .