In a separate study, we are analyzing the effects of ethanol exposure on gene expression in immortalized lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs). Details of the gene expression studies will be reported separately; here we note whether there was an effect of alcohol exposure on the expression of any of our top candidate genes. Briefly, 42 LCLs from subjects in the COGA study were either treated for 24 h with 75 mM ethanol or left untreated. The RNA was extracted and purified, and aliquots were analyzed on Affymetrix GeneChip® Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 microarrays following standard procedures. Results were analyzed by ANOVA with factors of treatment, phenotype (cells from alcoholics or controls) and sex (Edenberg et al., in preparation). False discovery rates were calculated using the Storey qvalue package (Storey and Tibshirani, 2003).
