Hi, thanks so much for your interest!

So far I've only found that young female (adult) flies prefer to drink more of the alcohol or the yeast that producing the alcohol over other yeasts. I am moving onto studying the physiological benefits of this in the next few months to better understand why they prefer it, but some preliminary results from our lab suggest that it might help them survive longer and produce more eggs.

If you were interested in the behaviour of larvae, there is also evidence that larvae prefer ethanol-rich environments! This hasn't been tested in the context of this yeast, but is a future study I'm considering to understand when these preferences develop.

I first became interested in this research whilst doing an internship at the University of Oxford looking at sex-specific differences in consumption of protein and carbohydrate in fruit flies! I'm very interested in the behavioural choices animals make, and how these influence their evolution and interact with their health. This intricate relationship between behaviour, nutrition, microbes and evolution was fascinating to me, with so many areas unexplored so I could really take it where I wanted. I'm currently working on the behavioural genetics side, where I'm looking for genes that might play a part in the nutritional choices made!