HDID-1 mice were clearly intoxicated when tested on the balance beam. The sensitivity of this task to detect intoxication is high (18), and the effective dose range across multiple inbred strains was between 1.0 and 1.4 g/kg ethanol (19). The lower end of this dose range would be expected to yield BECs in the range of many of the tested HDID-1 mice. Consistent with this notion, 39%–46% of mice in the S9 generation exhibited BECs that exceeded 100 mg% (Figure 1C), which is a value that has been shown to produce behavioral intoxication in mice (18,20). However, results with the accelerating rotarod (ARR) were more equivocal, because only mice tested second on the ARR showed signs of intoxication. We speculate that the very limited testing (three trials) may have contributed and that those mice for which the ARR experience was their first behavioral test while intoxicated may have been adapting nonspecifically to handling and novelty. One reason we suspect this may be true is that the control group tested first on the rotarod also showed substantially lower performance than the
