The University of California, San Francisco, has become a watering hole of sorts  for fruit flies.

There, in the lab of Ulrike Heberlein, an addiction researcher, fruit flies are choosing to consume alcohol. They are drinking (or rather, eating alcohol-spiked food) until they are intoxicated, even if they don’t like the taste. They are also falling off the wagon.

Dr. Heberlein, the author, with Anita V. Devineni, of a paper describing the findings in Current Biology, said the research represented an advance in their work trying to understand the genetic basis of human addictions to substances like alcohol and nicotine through the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Image Credit... Chris Gash

“For years we’ve been studying simple responses such as intoxication and tolerance development,” Dr. Heberlein said. The fruit fly’s well-known, easily studied genetics make it a model organism for such work. “Now, instead of passively giving the flies the alcohol, we are letting them choose to drink.”