After establishing the pattern and level of damage occurring in vertebral bone after acute and chronic binge alcohol treatment, we identified specific gene expression profiles associated with these treatments. We first identified global gene expression changes in L3 vertebrae after acute and chronic binge alcohol exposure. High biological replicate numbers in this experiment (n = 12 per group) enabled us to utilize a nonparametric statistical test, which decreased the effects of outlier data during analysis. Multiple testing correction reduced the overall false positive rate to 5%. As a first step in the analysis, we identified groups of genes that were differentially expressed (p < 0.05) in vertebral bone after both acute and chronic binge alcohol treatment compared to respective controls (C1 vs. A1 and C4 vs. A4). These gene lists were the basis for all subsequent bio-signatures identified in this study. We identified 1300 annotated differentially expressed genes in bone after an acute binge alcohol cycle and 1523 annotated genes after a chronic binge alcohol treatment cycle. The complete acute and chronic binge alcohol differentially expressed gene lists are shown
