Alcoholic
drinks have been with us for a very long time and occur naturally as fruit
falls and ferments with yeasts on the surface working their magic on the juices
oozing from damaged skins. I well remember an occasion, when too busy to pick
the plums from our plum trees, encountering a large number of wasps and bees
crawling about having difficulty in flying and having to consider walking home.
They were not in a very good mood and I expect their hangovers were significant.
Accidental
drinking apart, many of us enjoy a jar or two and treat ethanol with the
respect it deserves. This is not always possible, though, and sometimes she
(somehow ethanol sounds female although dictionaries insist that it is
masculine) becomes a demanding mistress.
Sometimes
our like of alcohol gets all-absorbing as our amygdala takes complete control.
It is interesting though that our amygdala shrinks as we become alcoholic, but
what is the chemical mechanism involved?
This
is clearly an important but challenging question and Lesscher et al were not going to let this issue
pass them by and set about to sort things out and take a look deep into the
genes. They reported out last week (1).
When
it comes to drunks, mice and men become pretty much of a muchness. Hence the
investigators started out with mice who were simple social drinkers taking a
drop or two when they felt like it. Like many of us with too little to do and a
bottle at hand, the mice increased their alcohol consumption over the first
couple of weeks and then wandered around in a happily titrated daze.
Well,
of course, if you are interested in genomics and have a large number of
alcoholic mice staggering about, you have a chance to look for the alcoholic’s control
gene and the amygdala 14-3-3ζ gene seemed to fit the bill nicely. So the next
step was to either knockdown the gene or enhance via infusion and to watch what
happens.
Well, when it was knocked out, the mice escalated there drinking
and carousing. They really needed their regular fix, as they weren’t being put
off by the addition of quinine to their drinks.
I should point out that a G and T has quinine in it and has been
a favorite beverage for a rather long time, so asking a sozzled rodent if it
would like another G and T was likely to be answered in the affirmative. We
all need to look after our 14-3-3ζs to keep us under control.
