Give male more beer!!

It is well know that males drink more beer (hopefully it is also true for Americans?) and drink beer more often. There is a recently research proposing that male fruit flies can drink more alcohol and respond more actively to alcohol. There is dimorphism for flies' response to alcohol - males express more active locomotion activities than females after exposed to alcohol and won't undergo sedation until higher concentration than females. That dimorphism is related to a gene called fruitless. In fruitless mutant, male flies respond like females to the alcohol in terms of lower activity and lower resistance to alcohol sedation. Ectopic expression of fruitless of male form in females fruitless mutant make females behave like males. Scientists then worked on interaction of fruitless with other genes and another gene called tank came out. In tank mutant males, they enjoy alcohol as tanks that cannot be filled up. So they tried to figure it out whether fruitless and tank interact at molecular level. Unfortunately, they do not co-localize so people turned to look at neuronal level. They used a technique called GRASP which will shine GFP if two synapses are close enough. Finally, they found they did interact with each other at neuronal level.