concept

Target-site insensitivity

The strategy of surviving a toxin by changing the thing it binds to, rather than trying to break it down faster. The monarch butterfly is the textbook case: its caterpillars eat milkweed loaded with cardiac glycosides - compounds that block the sodium-potassium pump every animal cell depends on - and they survive because two amino acid substitutions in their own pump drop its affinity for the toxin by orders of magnitude. The naked mole-rat does the same thing to acid pain; sulfide-spring fish do the same thing to the oxygen-reduction site of Complex IV. The same move, on three unrelated problems.