The current results are in agreement with a recent study (Bell et al., 2009), which used a similar multiple scheduled access ethanol drinking procedure, and reported no significant differences in gene expression in the whole ACB 15 hr after the last drinking episode between the ethanol and water groups (n = 9/group). Overall, the results suggest that alcohol drinking produces small changes in the ACB or sub-regions of the ACB that could only be detected with much higher numbers of animals in each group. Therefore, even with repeated high binge-like alcohol intakes (Fig. 1), the changes at any of the time points were too small to establish statistical significance. To detect such small differences would require markedly increasing the number of animals at each time period.
