Alcohol exposure, thus far, has been associated with the development of decreasing DNA methylation transferase (DNMT) mRNA levels in the sperm of male rats exposed to alcohol (Bonsch et al., 2006), and substantial evidence indicates that DNA methylation plays a significant role in neural cell lineage differentiation and early brain development (Takizawa et al., 2001; Setoguchi et al., 2006; Feng et al., 2007; MacDonald and Roskams, 2009). We recently demonstrated that alcohol exposure during early neurulation altered neural tube development and induced changes in DNA methylation, resulting in functional consequences on gene expression, cell cycle regulation, and neural development (Liu et al., 2009). The possibility of alcohol-induced alteration of stem cell DNA methylation changes is not clear, and evidence for alcohol causing aberrant stem cell development through altered DNA or histone methylation has not been examined.
