Taking it to the Next Level
While worms are great, Wolf was eager to do something more physiological. Wolf credits his advisor, Professor Ulrike Heberlein at UC San Francisco, for making the study of drugs of abuse in model organisms possible.
“There’s good evidence that there is a connection genetically between the behavioral responses of humans and flies,” Wolf said. “We’re not as different from flies as you might like to think.” Also, you can do experiments with fruit flies that can’t be done with humans, and do them faster than with other model organisms, so you can ask more openended questions. Wolf devoted six years as an associate investigator at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center in Emeryville, where he identified genes in flies and humans that are linked to alcoholism. But after almost 20 years in the Bay Area, he joined the UC Merced faculty in 2012. “This is like the California dream in a way, because you are helping to build something in the Old West sense,” Wolf said. “The campus is still young and there are so many things that need to be done.” During his early behavioral genetics research, Wolf learned the circuitry in the brain that is important for addiction overlaps with the circuitry for regulating eating. At UC Merced, Wolf and his team
are trying to understand more about the biological reward processes of alcohol and the motivational properties of food, using the fruit fly model. “We can learn a lot about what motivation is by studying behavior and manipulating brain circuits,” Wolf said. “If we can get a concrete model of what motivates a fly, we can turn that psychological concept into a wiring diagram of the brain, making it a biological concept. “It will tell us about how the cells regulate structural changes, which is important in what your brain is really good at — adapting to change.” Once addiction is better understood, more specific drugs could be created to reverse these processes. Wolf ’s research could also have an effect on how diseases like schizophrenia and depression are treated. For Wolf, that is enough. “I love discovering things. That’s what gets me up every day,” he said. “When you discover something at the bench, you can actually do something real in life.”
He studied behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila, using his computer science knowledge to develop tools to quantify the flies’ movements and study various behaviors, including their responses to alcohol. Why would you want to get a fruit fly drunk? A fruit fly’s main source of food is rotting fruit – fermented fruit, which has alcohol in it. Fruit flies also have a very long association with alcohol just like humans, so they have had time to develop mechanisms to deal with its toxic effects and develop a preference for its inebriating properties.
See a video about Professor Fred Wolf’s work with fruit flies and alcohol addiction.
SPRING 2014 | UC MERCED MAGAZINE
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