Project description:Herbivores are predicted to evolve appropriate mechanisms to process the plant secondary compounds (PSCs) in their diet and these mechanisms are likely specific to particular suites of PSCs. Changes in diet composition over evolutionary time should select for appropriate alterations in metabolism of the more recent dietary components. We investigated differences in gene expression profiles in the liver with respect to prior ecological and evolutionary experience with PSCs in the desert woodrat, Neotoma lepida. This woodrat species has populations in the Mojave Desert that have switched from feeding on juniper to feeding on creosote at the end of the Holocene as well as populations in the Great Basin Desert that still feed on the ancestral diet of juniper and are naïve to creosote. Juniper and creosote have notable differences in secondary chemistry. Woodrats from the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts were subjected to a fully crossed feeding trial on diets of juniper and creosote after which their livers were analyzed for gene expression. Hybridization of hepatic mRNAs to laboratory rat microarrays resulted in a total of 20,031 genes that met quality control standards. We analyzed differences in large-scale patterns of liver gene expression with respect to GO term enrichment. Diet had a larger effect on gene expression than population membership. However, woodrats with no prior evolutionary experience to the diet upregulated relatively far more genes compared to animals with prior exposure to that diet. This pattern may be the result of naive animal’s attempting to mitigate physiological damage caused by novel PSCs. fully crossed design, two by two feeding trial with two populations of the desert woodrat (Great Basin and Mojave) fed the two diets of juniper and creosote bush
Project description:We are studying the tree P. euphratica growing in its natural habitat in the Negev desert in Israel. We have used leaf RNA samples from trees growing from four different areas in the desert valley Ein Avdat with contrasting growth conditions, with the primary factor being how much water the trees have access to. Area A trees grow close to a stream. Area B trees are further away from the stream. Area C trees are growing on a slope with no water. Parking place trees grow at a parking place (1km from Area A, B and C) where there is a water irrigation system, and these trees are regularly watered once a week. The control sample in each hybridization is always RNA isolated from a pool of 5 trees from the parking place. The hybridizations are comparing the following: Area A -- parking place Area B -- parking place Area C -- parking place Each hybridization is done with a dye swap and three different biological repeats for a total of 18 hybridizations.
