A new study of living cells could revolutionize the way we test drugs
...odka, the probe registered an electrical signal. A drunken hiccup perhaps? "It was probably the last gasp of the dying cell," says Professor Geim. The researchers had added so much ethanol that it poisoned the cell. Although not the cardiogram they had hoped for, the electrical signal was the smallest yet ...Animals resistant to drunken behavior offer clues to alcoholism's roots
... carried a mutation rendering them invulnerable to drunken behavior. They discovered that the ethanol-resistant flies failed to produce a regulatory protein underlying the sedative effects of alcohol. The lacking protein is one of three encoded by a single gene and is also suspected to influence the cytoskel...