Next, we determined that alcohol exposure resulted in a radical change in the expression of individual BK exons. Alcohol rapidly (15 minutes) and profoundly decreased expression of the ALCOREX exon (Figure 2B). Moreover, longer alcohol exposure (6 hr, 24 hr) augmented that decrease, resulting in almost undetectable levels of this exon, corroborating our end-point PCR results. The STREX exon was also decreased, but to a lesser degree (Figure 2C).
