SCIENTISTS are giving cocaine to genetically modified fruit flies to combat a crippling illness that effect nearly 50 million Americans.
Researchers are using Drosophila flies, a species that has a lot in common with people, sharing around 75% of the genes that cause disease in humans.
The flies react to cocaine remarkably similar to humans, according to Adrian Rothenfluh, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah.
“At low doses, they start running around, just like people,” he told the university.
“At very high doses, they get incapacitated, which is also true in people.”
Because fruit flies grow quickly and are easy to use in genetic experiments, a fruit fly model of cocaine addiction could be used as an early step toward developing therapies.
However, the researchers are running into a major problem: a significant difference between flies and humans.
“Flies do not like cocaine one bit,” said Rothenfluh.
His team found that when given a choice between sugar water and sugar water laced with cocaine, the flies kept choosing the drug-free option — even if they’d been exposed to cocaine before.
To understand addiction in humans, the scientists had to figure out why the flies kept refusing the drug.
Travis Philyaw, the first author on a paper of the team’s findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience, said the answer is possibly in the flies’ sense of taste.
“Insects are evolutionarily primed to avoid plant toxins, and cocaine is a plant toxin,” he said.
They have taste receptors on their ‘arms’ — their tarsal segments — so they can put their hand in something before it goes in their mouth, and decide, ‘I’m not going to touch that.’”
By observing how the flies’ sensory nerves responded to the cocaine, the researchers realized that the compound activates a bitter sensation in the flies’ taste receptors.
After muting the activity of the bitter-sensing nerves, the flies soon developed a preference for the cocaine-laced sugar water at low concentration.
“We can scale research so quickly in flies,” said Philyaw.
“We can identify risk genes that might be difficult to uncover in more complex organisms, and then we pass that information to researchers who work with mammalian models.
“Then, they’re able to uncover treatment targets that facilitate the jump from studying animal behavior to developing human therapeutics.”
Rothenfluh agreed, saying the team can start to understand the “mechanisms of cocaine choice, and the more you understand about the mechanism, the more you have a chance to find a therapy that might act on that mechanism.”
Cocaine use disorder is a highly heritable condition with no effective treatments.
At the time of writing, there are no FDA-approved pharmacotherapies to treat the disorder.
While the study isn’t at the stage of developing therapies for cocaine addiction yet, Rothenfluh said it showed fascinating insights.
“Just trying to understand the simple little fly brain can give us insights that you cannot anticipate,” he said.
“Basic science is important, and you never know what exciting things you might find that turn out to be impactful for understanding the human condition.”
University of UtahTravis Philyaw said the flies didn’t like the taste of the drug, but the team found a way to circumvent the issue[/caption] GettyThe team believes the findings could be used to find future therapies for cocaine use disorders[/caption] Read More Details
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