Gene expression has been profiled in postmortem human brain from alcoholics and controls (Flatscher-Bader et al., 2005; Iwamoto et al., 2004; Liu et al., 2007; Liu et al., 2006; Mayfield et al., 2002; McClintick et al., 2013). Those data, while important, do not allow one to disentangle the effects of long term alcohol exposure and pre-existing expression differences. Animal models have been used to detect both innate differences in gene expression (Edenberg et al., 2005; Kimpel et al., 2007) and differences due to alcohol consumption (Rodd et al., 2008). However, for studies of living humans an accessible tissue such as blood or a cell culture surrogate such as Epstein Barr virus (EBV) transformed lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) can be of great value. Thibault et al. (Thibault et al., 2005) concluded that in vitro assays in human cell lines are valuable for identifying changes in expression profiles upon exposure to ethanol and other drugs of addiction. Gene expression profiles of LCLs are most like the B-cells from which they were derived (Min et al., 2010). They can provide insights into immune
