Sexually-deprived flies turn to booze

Recently I’ve became very interested in studying addiction. The other day I was surfing pubmed database searching for scientific papers and I found a paper called „Sexual Deprivation Increases Ethanol Intake in Drosophila“. I instantely clicked on that and it was so funny and interesting at the same time that I decided to share the information with you.

Surprisingly enough, they vere investigating ethanol preference in sex-deprived males Drosophila melanogaster – fruit flies (Those little bastards appearing out of nowhere on your fruit). Basically, they had two groups of males. The first one was the males that got laid and the second one the males that got rejected by females. Then they give them a choice – drink or not to drink. Results? The rejected ones preferentially chose drinking ethanol while the first group chose to stay sober.

Next they wanted to investigate whether the alcoholism was caused by rejection or sex deprivation generally. Now read carefully. To distinguish between these two possibilities, they took the sex-deprived males and put them together with... decapitated females. So... they cannot reject them... How low you have to sink, they have to actually decapitate your female to prevent her from rejecting you? The researchers then evaluate the preferences and SURPRISE, they drunk also. Who would‘ve guess that... AFTER SEX DEPRIVATION AND THEN FORCING YOU TO LOOK AT DECAPITATED FEMALES?

Of course this is not the whole story. They wanted to find out WHY. They aimed for a molecule called neuropeptide F (NPF). This molecule is associated with reward system in sexual experience in fruit flies. We also have a homologue (a few changes caused by evolution) called neuropeptide Y and strangely enough, it is also associated with ethanol consumption.

Neuropeptide F
They look at the levels of NPF in the „brain“ of both groups and find out that the sex-deprived males had significantly lower NPF that the lucky ones. But they found out something also something else – the males could increase the levels of NPF by ethanol. In other words – fruit flies males can achieve the reward „feeling“ by banging the female or by turning to booze.

Fluorescent leves of neuropeptide F (brain mRNA) in both groups (Reference #1)

Everything is just about the right stimuli. The males are hardwared to seek the rewards in sex. But if they don’t have it, they look for alternative.

I'm Peter and this is BeWise, drink and sex safely ;)

Reference: #1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22422983