The identification of genes mediating biological responses to ethanol, including the modification of risk profiles for alcoholism, is an area of intense research interest due to the possibility of pinpointing targets for future alcoholism therapies. Recent advances in behavioral genetics and genomics have identified large numbers of genes that potentially contribute to phenotypic responses to ethanol in both human and animal models. However, little progress has been made in narrowing or organizing these large lists of genes into a tractable scheme for understanding the neurobiology and genetics of alcoholism. One approach that has been used for large collections of microarray data has been the performance of a meta-analysis across data on rodent models of divergent ethanol drinking collected from multiple centers and strains [3]. However, this analysis identified 3,800 genes associated with variation in ethanol intake, making downstream hypothesis-driven studies difficult to formulate.
