GSK3β is involved in ethanol-induced neurotoxicity (French and Heberlein, 2009; Luo, 2009; Zeng et al., 2012; Shah et al., 2015). The complete occlusion of the ethanol-induced suppression of γ oscillations by a GSK3β inhibitor indicates that GSK3β activity is crucially involved in the γ oscillation suppression associated with intoxicating effect of ethanol. This is supported by the observation that ethanol increases GSK3β activity via dephosphorylation of GSK3β at serine 9 (Liu et al., 2009). At this moment it is not clear how GSK3β activity affects intrinsic and or tonic synaptic activity in the γ-generating network. Interestingly, GSK3β negatively modulates presynaptic glutamate release (Zhu et al., 2010), which could contribute to the ethanol-induced suppression of γ oscillations (Figure 7).
