Despite the above studies that focused on specific genes or categories of genes, there are few papers which provide characterization of the microglial transcriptome following alcohol treatment or consumption. Transcript profiling has been carried out using RNA from whole brain [4], amygdala [21], prefrontal cortex [22], and nucleus accumbens [23] from alcohol-fed mice. While pathway analysis identified many microglial associated functions, only a single study has directly examined the transcriptome of microglia acutely isolated from cortex of alcohol-fed mice [24]. In that study, over 400 transcripts were identified in the microglial that were not present in pre-frontal cortical RNA [22], suggesting that cell type enrichment is necessary to fully characterize the effects of alcohol on the microglial transcriptome.
