Fruit flies longer engaged in sex, if their biological clock breaks, reports The New Scientist.

The discovery, the results of which were published in Current Biology, happened accidentally. At the University of Oregon in Corvalis, USA, they studied how the Drosophila would multiply if they turned off the gene responsible for regulating the so-called circadian rhythm, that is, for alternating sleep and wakefulness. The laboratory assistant, who was observing the experimental flies, noticed that the fruit flies with the genome turned off copulated by 30-50 percent longer than their healthy counterparts, according to the Internet publication for girls and women aged 14-35 who had been diagnosed with Pannochka. Net The head of the study Jaga Giebultowicz explains that the flies "lost track of time".

A specialist in biological clock genes from the University of Leicester in the UK, Ezio Rosato, believes that this is not surprising, since the biological clock's genes are also responsible for behavior not related to time, for example, for sexual courtship of males Fruit flies.

However, the mechanism of the effect of the "hour" gene on the duration of sexual intercourse is unclear, since having sex has nothing to do with the duration of daylight hours.

The study of genes responsible for diurnal rhythms is of great importance for understanding human biorhythms, in particular, for solving the problem of disturbance of circadian rhythm in connection with flight over several time zones.

Although human genes are more complex than the Drosophila genes, the basic mechanisms for regulating daily rhythms in humans and fruit flies are the same. Scientists prefer to work with flies solely because of greater convenience.

Nevertheless, it would be very interesting to check whether the deactivation of the biological clock gene on a person's sexual behavior has the same effect as the behavior of fruit fly, Rosato adds.

Medicus. En.

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