The caudate nucleus forms part of the dorsal striatum (and more broadly, the basal ganglia), a key component of the executive control loop that is recruited in the onset and maintenance of AUD.27 The caudate has been implicated in cue-elicited activation, dopamine increase, and in subjective reports of craving.28,29 In animal models, chronic ethanol exposure alters neural circuits in the basal ganglia30,31 with a recent study reporting differences in gene expression in the dorsal striatum of alcohol-preferring rats32. A transcription-wide association study found that among 13 human brain tissues, the caudate was the region with the most genes whose predicted expression was associated with problematic alcohol use (PAU), a trait that combines AUD with problematic alcohol drinking.5 However, the caudate harbors multiple cell-types33 and cell-type-specific characterization of the AUD-associated transcriptome in the human caudate is lacking.
