Episode 43, Behaviour
Drunk Worms: Dopamine, Serotonin, and Behaviour
Drunk Worms: Dopamine, Serotonin, and Behaviour
Show notes
Welcome to the next episode of the Worm Podcast 🪱
Today we’re looking at something surprisingly familiar in worm biology: alcohol.
But not just exposure — we’re talking about behaviour, tolerance, withdrawal, and how core neurotransmitter systems shape all of it.
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🧬 The central question
What actually happens when a worm is exposed to ethanol?
Not just in terms of movement — but across:
• behaviour
• lifespan
• neuronal signalling
• and gene expression
This study takes a multi-layered approach to understand how alcohol reshapes the worm.
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🔬 What they did
Worms were exposed to ethanol for 24 hours, followed by a withdrawal phase, and then tested in a behavioural assay — the classic diacetyl race.
This creates a simple but powerful 3-step model:
exposure
withdrawal
re-exposure
A framework that starts to look a lot like tolerance biology.
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🧠 What they found
The response to ethanol isn’t uniform — it depends on the nervous system.
• Wild-type worms show reduced lifespan at higher ethanol doses
• Dopamine (dop-3) and serotonin (tph-1) mutants respond differently
• Behaviour during chemotaxis is altered — not just slower, but less coordinated
• Re-exposure can rescue or worsen behaviour, depending on genotype
This is not just toxicity.
It’s state-dependent behaviour.
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⚡ Neurons are doing the work
At the cellular level, ethanol increases vesicle exocytosis in both dopaminergic and serotonergic neurons.
So the system is not shutting down — it’s being actively rewired.
And importantly, intact dopamine and serotonin signalling are required for normal responses to ethanol.
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🧪 The molecular layer
Ethanol exposure also shifts gene expression:
• Stress response genes like gst-4 and sod-3 are altered
• Metabolic genes like adh-1 are downregulated
• The response differs depending on dopamine and serotonin function
So behaviour, neurons, and metabolism are all coupled.
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🧠 The take-home message
Ethanol in C. elegans is not just a stressor.
It’s a probe.
A way to reveal how:
• neurotransmitters
• behaviour
• and metabolism
interact at the whole-organism level.
And the key point?
You don’t get the phenotype without the network.
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📄 Paper discussed
Rubio-Tomás, T.; Hunn, C. A.; Hajdú, G.; Sőti, C.; Tavernarakis, N.; Barta, C. (2026)
Specific genes of the dopaminergic (dop-3) and serotonergic (tph-1) pathways contribute to the effects of ethanol consumption in Caenorhabditis elegans
PLOS One, 21(3): e0344966
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