In an effort to populate an inclusive gene list with non-biased data from at least two species, we used published microarray gene expression data from our own and other laboratories. As shown in Figure 1, microarray gene expression data was used from three sources: acute responses to ethanol in C57BL/6 and DBA2/J mice (whole genome analysis of samples from reference [14]) that had been supplemented with additional microarray studies (U74B and U74C arrays, Affymetrix) on the same samples, a meta-analysis of genes involved in ethanol preference drinking across multiple mouse strains [3], and analysis of prefrontal cortex from autopsied samples of alcoholic and non-alcoholic brains [15]. We then merged these datasets by utilizing gene homology mapping features within the WebGestalt [32]. This produced a list of 2458 genes. These genes were ranked by scores resulting from the following algorithm:
