LCLs from alcohol dependent individuals (AD) and controls were exposed to ethanol (or not) for 48 h and the differences in expression were analyzed by RNA sequencing. Cells from these same individuals had previously been used in a 24h exposure to ethanol (McClintick et al.,2014). We have previously shown that exposure to 75 mM ethanol was not toxic to LCLs, and that the doubling time in the presence of ethanol was very close to that in its absence (27.7 h vs. 27.4 h; McClintick et al., 2014). 12,503 genes were detectably expressed in the LCLs. Ethanol exposure resulted in differential expression of 4456 genes at FDR ≤ 0.05 (Table 2, Supplemental Table S1), 3716 (83%) of which are also expressed in human brain (median TPM ≥ 2 for at least one brain region in the GTEx V7 data, Supplemental Table S1). Among the 4456 genes, 2332 (52%) showed increased expression. Most of changes were small (Figure 1); 2318 genes (52%) had absolute fold change ≥ 1.2. There were no significant differences in the effects of ethanol on cells from AD individuals and controls, nor were there significant differences in the effects of ethanol on cells from men and women.
