Alcohol consumption in the two-bottle choice test is extremely sensitive to genetic background (Blednov et al., 2010b). The B6 mouse has the highest alcohol consumption of inbred strains, but we found that an FVBxB6F1 hybrid has even higher alcohol consumption and that B6xNZBF1 shows moderate consumption, whereas the FVB strain demonstrates very low consumption (Blednov et al., 2005b; Yoneyama et al., 2008). In addition to the initial level of consumption, we showed that the effect of a period of abstinence or deprivation on subsequent consumption varies among genotypes, with some showing sustained alcohol consumption and others showing reduced alcohol consumption (Blednov et al., 2010a). Therefore, we asked if LPS pretreatment could increase alcohol consumption in the very-high-consuming hybrid mice, and we tested related hybrids with lower alcohol consumption and with different patterns of consumption after abstinence. The effect of abstinence described above was demonstrated in female mice, and we used only females (with two injections of LPS) for these experiments.
