Alcohol abuse is a pervasive problem known to be influenced by various 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[1]related behaviors such as self-administration and addiction. 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. The mated males showed less preference to alcohol and sexually deprived flies showed much preference to alcohol. And we had even found that the age will effect on the alcohol preference or not, and we found that younger sexually deprived flies showed fluctuations in preference of alcohol food over normal food but whereas older flies showed stronger and stabilized preference to alcohol containing food over normal food. And the sexually deprived and then mated flies showed decreased preference to ethanol food over regular food according to their age. Thus, ethanol preference in flies provides a new model for studying important aspects of addiction and their underlying mechanisms.
