The present study was designed to provide a direct comparison of the effects of chronic alcohol consumption from three different mouse models on brain (prefrontal cortex, PFC) and liver gene expression as well as to identify the ethanol treatment whose effects were most similar to the immune response produced by LPS. PFC was chosen because it is commonly used in studies of gene expression in human alcoholics [3] and is a brain region important for consequences of chronic alcohol consumption [18], [19]. We chose the continuous two bottle choice (Chronic) test because it is probably the most widely used model of mouse alcohol consumption [20], [21], the every other day or chronic intermittent (CI) model because it promotes high intake and is gaining popularity for medication development [22], [23] and the limited access drinking in the dark (DID) test because it produces high blood ethanol levels and is a model of binge drinking [15]. Inflammatory processes and activation of innate immunity is established as a critical component of alcoholic liver disease [24], [25] and is also emerging as an important
