How alcohol drains your brain around the garden

Alcohol leads us to remember positive experiences and to forget about negative experiences. How is it possible? By studying alcohol-eating fruit flies, the researchers found that a chain reaction in the brain eventually led to the change of an amino acid.

It looks like a truck has been driven, a meal coming out of the same side: the negative effects of alcohol are not unknown to us. Some mornings, you may think that you will never drink again. Yet you have often forgotten this intention after a week and you remember especially the sweetness of your evening with your friends, and you order with pleasure a rogue gold.

Researchers at Brown University, USA, asked I wonder how drugs such as alcohol, which are pure poisons for our body, can produce such enriching memories, while memories of unpleasant consequences escape.

Frivolous fruit flies

A fruit fly experiment was to answer this question. Fruit flies were allowed to look for alcohol, while researchers studied what was happening at the molecular level in their brains. While the flies used generously, the researchers paused the different genes involved in the reward and avoidance system. When a gene is inactive, some proteins are not created. As a result, researchers have seen what proteins play a role in the reward effect of alcohol.

The reward and avoidance system makes you want to repeat pleasurable experiences and get away from anything that has an unpleasant effect. For example, during a pleasurable experience, your brain releases the dopamine neurotransmitter. He says to your body: "It was great, we start again next time!" This is a natural response to pleasurable stimuli such as food, sex and social interactions, but also to drugs like alcohol. But this last category overthrows the system.

Molecular Pathway

Researchers have discovered that alcohol modifies a certain "molecular pathway" in the fruit fly compensation and avoidance system. Such a pathway is a succession of different proteins and other molecules that influence each other, such as a series of overflowing dominoes

. This eventually changed the receptors that recognize dopamine. These "dopamine D2 receptors" are involved in determining the pleasant or unpleasantness of an experiment

The effect of alcohol on these receptors was surprisingly subtle. Similar studies often show major effects, such as complete blocking of a receptor or simply increasing the number of receptors. However, alcohol changes only one of the amino acids from which such a receptor is integrated with another amino acid.

This small change seems to have major consequences for how you feel with a memory. Researchers do not yet know exactly how this mechanism works, but they now know where to look in future research.

Memory of Alcohol

the effect of this change, you are probably not obliged to be a heavy user. If fruit fly research can be translated for people, a long-term effect is visible after three glasses of wine. The molecular path has been adjusted so that your body looks for alcohol, despite its unpleasant consequences.

This research provides new information on what underlies the long-term memory of alcohol. This is very interesting because we know that the memory of alcohol plays an important role in the maintenance and relapse of addiction, "says Taco de Vries, professor of translational neuroscience at VU Medical Center. "Before we can translate this into people, it is important to see if this mechanism also plays a role in the compulsive aspects of addictive behaviors, such as loss of control of absorption. You do not measure these aspects with this model system of fruit flies. "

Previous studies have shown that people with little dopamine D2 receptors are addictive, but it appears that not only the number but also the precise composition of the receptors is relevant." A better understanding of molecular processes that influence these receptors may ultimately lead to better drug treatment.