Notably, while microglia appear to be the main player in NLRP3 inflammasome activation in the brain (Hanamsagar et al., 2012), recent studies have independently demonstrated that rat or human astrocytes express NLRP3 (Tezel et al., 2012) and NLRP2 (Minkiewicz et al., 2013) and are able to activate NLRP3 in response to DAMPs. Our in vivo immunohistochemical studies further support that in vivo ethanol treatment increases NLRP3 inflammasome activation in GFAP+ astroglial cells along with the production of IL-1β and IL-18 in WT mice cerebral cortex. According to these results, prior work from our laboratory has shown that ethanol promotes IL-1β production in both astrocytes (Blanco et al., 2005; Alfonso-Loeches et al., 2010) and microglia (Fernandez-Lizarbe et al., 2009) in culture, as well as in the cerebral cortex of ethanol-treated mice (Alfonso-Loeches et al., 2010).
