expression in the brain. Besides splicing, which was the focus of this study, there are other molecular mechanisms that might be involved. For example, alcohol is associated with aberrant patterns of DNA methylation of CpG islands27 and changes in histone code28; alcohol is also capable of changing the expression of microRNAs which fine-tune the transcriptome in the cytoplasm29. Of note, as the extent of transcriptomic damage in our study was different across brain regions, it is possible that the mechanism of alcohol-induced changes may be region-specific and should likely be studied separately in each anatomical site.
