In the past few years, there have been several studies on alcohol-induced changes in gene expression in the brain. For example, gene expression profiling on the prefrontal cortex identified 129 altered genes in patients with AUD16. Likewise, microarray analysis detected 163 differentially expressed genes in the superior frontal cortex in AUD8. However, to what extent alcohol can affect transcriptome posttranscriptionally via splicing remains unknown. In this study, we combined a conventional analysis of differential expression with the genome-wide assessment of mis-splicing events. Results of differential expression analysis were relatively comparable with previous studies. We found that alcohol affects gene expression on a moderate scale. Thus, the least affected region was the nucleus accumbens in which only 14 genes were affected, while the most affected region was the basolateral amygdala (102 genes). It is not known yet how alcohol affects gene expression in the brain. Besides splicing, which was the focus of this study, there are other molecular mechanisms that might be involved. For example, alcohol is associated with aberrant patterns of DNA methylation of CpG islands27 and changes in histone
