For as much as Austinites love their alcohol, there’s surprisingly little known about the actual mechanisms of how alcohol affects the brain. However, a recent study by Rebecca Howard, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Waggoner Center for Alcohol & Addictions Research, and Gregg Homanics, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, helped to illuminate what’s going on. The study may have implications for the development of medications used to treat alcohol abuse.

Researchers used to think that when alcohol enters the brain, it dissolves inside the membranes of nerve cells, generally disturbing the functioning of those cells. This is different to how most drugs affect the brain. For years, researchers have known that drugs such as cocaine, heroin and marijuana bind to specific proteins in the brain, which then changes the function of those proteins. When the proteins’ functions are changed, the result is the effects we’re familiar with.

Alcohol molecules, though, are smaller than those of other drugs, so they’re not ready-made to bind with any specific protein. Thus the theory that alcohol simply dissolved inside neurons and disturbed functioning.

In the last 10 or 15 years, new research has shifted thinking on the matter. Alcohol has also been observed to interact with multiple types of proteins, unlike other drugs that interact reliably with only one. The fact that alcohol does not bond easily with a particular protein could be why it takes relatively much larger quantities of alcohol to affect people’s behavior than is true of other drugs — cocaine and heroin are often consumed just a few milligrams at a time, while a single shot of alcohol contains several grams, or about 1,000 times as much.

Researchers in the current study have taken the understanding of alcohol’s mechanisms to a crucial next step: They have determined that alcohol interacts with specific amino acids in specific areas and in specific ways. In other words, not only does alcohol not simply cause chaos inside neurons, its effects are actually a lot more orderly than anyone thought. And if its effects are orderly, it’s a lot easier to make a medicine that combats alcohol abuse.

Researchers also determined that traditional methods of studying how alcohol affects the brain may not be the best ones to use. Encouraging the use of nontraditional techniques may be an important first step toward future discoveries.