We assessed the behavioral effects of altering ethanol metabolism on the locomotion of worms. We exposed wild-type and ADH-defective animals to exogenous ethanol and recorded their locomotion on plates after 10 minutes of exposure. 400 mM was chosen as the upper dose for locomotion analyses using mutant or knockdown strains rather than 500 mM because we hypothesized that the metabolism-defective animals might show hypersensitivity to ethanol and we wanted to eliminate possible floor effects at 500 mM. Loss of sodh-1 conferred mild but significant hypersensitivity to ethanol when the animals were tested on low (200 mM) and high concentrations (400 mM) of the drug (Figure 3a and 3b). Reduction of function of H24K24.3 did not change the effects of ethanol on locomotion significantly, although there may be a trend towards increased sensitivity. Inactivating both sodh-1 and H24K24.3 did not increase the effect of ethanol on locomotion compared with the sodh-1(ok2799) mutation alone (Figure 3a). These results indicate that the difference in ethanol accumulation seen with sodh-1(ok2799) mutant animals is sufficient to alter the behavior of the animals when they are
