Anita Devineni and Ulrike Heberlein from the University of California, San Francisco, have done a study on alcoholism in fruit flies. They created a special device for the flies with water bottle type things, on bottle had liquid food that was spiked 15% ethanol and the other bottle just had plain liquid food. The flies had the choice of which to consume, and it was found that the spiked food was consumed a lot faster than the plain food. Over a period of five days the flies preference to the alcohol adjusted, and the more they adjusted the stronger the alcohol could be. Drunken behavior was observed, such as loss of coordination’s and hyperactivity. The flies liked alcohol so much that when the toxic chemical quinine was mixed into their boozed up food they continued to drink it, even though normally they would avoid the chemical. Researchers think that these studies may be useful for the understanding of why Humans are so attracted to alcohol.
I found this article to be rather interesting, because it had to do with alcohol and flies, random but entertaining. The article didn’t use many big words so it was easy to read, and it wasn’t al that long so the shortness factor was quite pleasing. But I felt like the article wasn’t that direct, I mean yes at the end of it I understood the subject and all of the research but it would have been better it if had just been strait to the point of what was going on with these fruit flies and alcohol. It was very interesting that fruit flies can have alcohol addictions just like humans can and I think it is fascinating that scientists can learn about the human addiction from fruit flies.
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I think that Georgia did a great job summarizing this article. I like how she explained the way that scientist fed the fruit flies alcohol and how she told us how much alcohol was given to them. I also loved the video of the drunk fruit fly her and Amelia showed in class. Finally she did a great job of emphasizing how the flies wanted the alcohol more than the normal food because they had become addicted to the alcohol and how it relates back to people too.
ReplyDeleteSomething Georgia could have done to make this great review even better is to correct a few grammar errors.
I learned from this review that just like humans, fruit flies can become alcoholics too.
I really liked the topic that Georgia picked, and how she described it. She did a great job at showing the scientific experiment that proved that the flies had a preference in liking the spiked bottle of liquid. I also enjoyed hearing about how the fly responded to this alcohol it had been consuming, by having a loss of coordination and hyperactivity. I think Georgia could have described the “water bottle type thingies” a little better and that she could have gone into a bit more detail about if other animals have a taste for alcohol. In all I really liked how she summed up this article, and stated why it was important for science research to the ways humans interact with liquor.
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