An initial list of 2458 genes that show altered expression in mouse brain in response to ethanol in two previous studies [3,14] was used as a starting point. These datasets were abbreviated as MuAc and MuPref (see Figure 1). Five additional data sources were used to construct a score for these genes, including 1) genes showing altered expression in the prefrontal cortex of human alcoholics (abbreviated as HuAlc) [15], 2) linkage intervals from published studies of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) and the Irish Study of Alcoholism samples (abbreviated as HuLink) [16-18], 3) genes contained on a human addiction/alcoholism array (abbreviated as HuAddChip) [19], 4) those from a smaller list of ethanol-related genes compiled from Drosophila (abbreviated as Dr) [20,21], and 5) a short list of ethanol-related genes compiled from C. elegans (abbreviated as Ce) [22]. Additionally, genes having cross-species hits acquired bonus scores (the "Cross" score in our algorithm, see Table 1), as cross-species evidence was regarded as an important factor in gene salience. Here, we used score to estimate the evidence of a gene,
