You might want to think twice about having that extra beer when you're out with the guys...

I know drinking a bit too much can result in "beer goggles," but who knew such inebriation could potentially have you saying sweet nothings into the ear of the guy sitting next to you at the bar?

Among the team's discoveries is that male fruit flies, which typically court females, also actively court males when they are given a daily dose of ethanol. "We identified three molecules that are crucial for "ethanol-induced courtship disinhibition," Han said. In one of the team's experiments, Han and her students generated transgenic flies whose brain activities regulated by the neurotransmitter dopamine could be turned off temporarily by changing the temperature to 32-degrees C. "Without a temperature change, the transgenic males showed conspicuous inter-male courtship under the influence of ethanol; however, they exhibited negligible inter-male courtship when we changed the temperature to block the transmission of dopamine neurons in the brain," Han said. "This result suggests that dopamine is a key mediator of ethanol-induced inter-male courtship."

A second discovery is that repeated exposure to ethanol causes male flies to engage in more inter-male courtship, a phenomenon known as "behavioral sensitization." "If a behavior like alcohol consumption becomes more pleasurable the more often you do it, you are more likely to keep doing it," Han explained. Because the researchers suspect that behavioral sensitization results from adaptive changes in the brain's cells and molecules induced by chronic alcohol consumption, they plan to use behavioral sensitization as a model for further physiological studies of alcohol-associated behavior and addiction. "This part of our study demonstrates that sexual behavior is not determined only during an organism's development, but it also can be influenced by a post-developmental environmental factor; in this case, recurring exposure to ethanol," Han said. "These findings represent the first demonstration of enduring behavioral changes induced by recurring ethanol exposure in a fly model."

Read more at Science Daily.