While drug-induced alterations in histone acetylation have to date been implicated in the behavioral responses to drugs of abuse in simple models such as conditioned place preference and locomotor assays, future research is needed to translate these findings to more sophisticated models of human addiction, such as self-administration and relapse paradigms. These pre-clinical behavioral models can directly assess the role of histone acetylation in the pathogenesis and maintenance of the addicted state by studying how animals acquire drug self-administration and how they relapse after periods of drug withdrawal.
