Previously, we reported an initial microarray analysis of prefrontal cortex (PFC), nucleus accumbens (NAc) and ventral midbrain (VMB) brain regions from the B6 and D2 inbred strains and identified 307 genes that changed significantly with acute ethanol treatment [21]. To extend those prior efforts and construct gene expression network correlations with ethanol behaviors, we conducted an extensive microarray analysis of PFC, NAc, and VMB across 27 recombinant inbred mouse lines from the BXD family and the B6 and D2 parental lines from which they were derived. The greater statistical power and genetic diversity provided by the BXD microarray data made it possible to detect lower magnitude or more variable changes in expression, as well as changes that would otherwise be absent in a study limited to the B6 and D2 strains due to epistatic suppression.
