Genes in the Cd14 gene network that we found to have significant expression changes after ethanol treatment in our microarray experiment were selected for RT-PCR analyses to verify their expression in the hippocampus across all 10 strains. The RT-PCR result showed that expressions of Cd14, Ly86, CD68 and Il18 were significantly decreased after ethanol treatment compared with the saline group (Fig 4), which was consistent with the results from the microarrays. However, the expression of Aif1 was very low, and a difference between the two groups could not be detected. The expression of Cd14 was decreased by approximately 40% in ethanol group when compared with the saline group (F = 9.6471, P<0.0064). The expression of Ly86, Cd68, and Il18 were decreased by 42% (F = 3.3889, P<0.0027), 37% (F = 8.0179, P<0.0114), and 31% (F = 6.7052, P<0.0191) respectively in the ethanol group compared to the control group.
