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Addiction-like behavior in Drosophila

Anita V. Devineni and Ulrike Heberlein

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Alcohol abuse is a pervasive problem known to be influenced by genetic factors, yet our understanding of the mechanisms underlying alcohol addiction is far from complete. Drosophila melanogaster has been established as a model for studying the molecular mechanisms that mediate the acute and chronic effects of alcohol. However, the Drosophila model has not yet been extended to include more complex alcohol-related behaviors such as self-administration. We recently established a paradigm to characterize ethanol consumption and preference in flies. We demonstrated that flies prefer to consume ethanol-containing food over regular food, and this preference exhibits several features of alcohol addiction: flies increase ethanol consumption over time, they consume ethanol to pharmacologically relevant concentrations, they will overcome an aversive stimulus in order to consume ethanol, and they exhibit relapse after a period of ethanol deprivation. Thus, ethanol preference in flies provides a new model for studying important aspects of addiction and their underlying mechanisms. One mutant that displayed decreased ethanol preference, krasavietz, may represent a first step toward uncovering those mechanisms.

Devineni AV, Heberlein U. Preferential ethanol consumption in Drosophila models features of addiction. Curr Biol 2009; 19:2126-32.

Authors

Anita V. Devineni

Ulrike Heberlein

This is an open-access article

 Download PDF

If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.