Fruit flies share 75% of the genes involved in substance addiction with cocaine. But they are not attracted to this drug that allows scientists to reveal the genetics of addiction and accelerate the development of therapies.
A study collected on Monday in the magazine Journal of Neuroscience It describes how fruit flies (‘Drosophila Melanogaster’) are a ‘reef’ to break down the biology of cocaine addiction, a growing and mortal problem worldwide.
In addition to sharing with humans the genes involved in the consumption of toxic substances, fruit flies grow quickly and it is relatively easy to do genetic experiments with them.
The authors had already experienced with this insect to study alcohol addiction, isolating the genes they share with people in that uncontrolled consumption trend.
“There is only one problem, and that, unlike humans, cocaine doesn’t like anything,” says one of the authors Adrian Rothenflu, psychiatry researcher at the University of Utah, in the United States.
Cocaine activates the bitter sensation receptors of the flies, so when the researchers gave them to choose between a sweet solution with sucrose and a similar with cocaine, they systematically chose the option without drugs, even when they had previously exposed to cocaine.
The answer, according to scientists, may be in the sense of taste of flies, since insects are evolutionarily prepared to avoid toxins of plants, and cocaine is a vegetable toxin.
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Flies reveal the biology of cocaine addiction, key to promoting therapies
The fly, specifically, has gustatory receptors in its “arms” (its tarsal segments), so that they can put their hands on something and know how he knows before ingesting it.
When observing how the sensory nerves of cocaine flies responded, the researchers realized that this drug strongly activated the bitter taste receptors in the ‘arms’ of the flies.
By silencing the activity of these nerves so that they could not perceive bitter flavors, they began to prefer sugary water with cocaine to normal sugary water with amazing speed, at 16 hours of the first exhibition.
The reaction of flies when taking cocaine is similar to that of humans, says Rothenflu: “at low doses, begin to run from one place to another, at very high doses they are incapacitated.”
Until now, the large number of genes involved in the risk of addiction has made it difficult to determine which could be the best therapeutic targets.
In this way, understanding the biology of addiction in the fly opens the possibility of accelerating the development of new therapies for the prevention and treatment of the consumption disorder of this substance.
“Flies help us to go faster in identifying risk genes and better understand the mechanisms that guide the choice of cocaine, which are key to finding therapeutic targets that can act on that mechanism,” Rothenflux concludes in a statement from the University of Utah.
With EFE information.
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