We refer to these genes as alcohol metabolism loci, but their protein products have other functions as well. Beyond these alcohol metabolism-related aspects, there are other issues, which may open new routes in ADH1B research. Beyond the hepatic ADH1B isoform (ENST00000394887), there is another ADH1B transcript (ENST00000506651) highly expressed in adipose and cardiac tissues (GTEx data). Since transcriptomic analysis demonstrated that ADH1B expression in adipose tissues is associated with metabolic traits [Winnier and others 2015], further investigations are necessary to understand the mechanisms related to non-hepatic ADH1B expression. One important aspect of ADH1B gene regulation is surely the role of non-coding variants. In GTEx data, we observed that non-coding variants regulate ADH1B expression in multiple tissues and, in particular, rs10516440 seems to coordinate the gene expression of ADH1 genes in multiple tissues and to be associated with alcohol dependence in African-Americans and European-Americans. Important information could be provided by understanding how coding and non-coding variations interact in determining the ADH1B function and how ADH1B regulatory mechanisms are shared with the other ADH genes. Investigating ADH1B molecular pathways, we observed that
