blood lymphocytes of 191 subjects at high risk for AUDs. They reported that women homozygous for the 3,3 allele of the VNTR polymorphism had a trend (p <0.10) of increased overall methylation of the MAOA promoter region than women homozygous for the 4,4 allele of the VNTR polymorphism. Taqi et al.46 found that three AUD-associated PDYN CpG-SNPs, that is, SNPs that overlap with CpG sites, could directly alter the methylation status of these PDYN CpGs in postmortem dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dl-PFC) of 14 AUD patients and 14 control subjects. In a recent study, we investigated genome-wide mQTLs that were associated with 384 CpGs in promoter regions of 82 addiction-related genes using peripheral blood DNAs of 268 African Americans (AAs: 129 AUD cases and 139 controls) and 143 European Americans (EAs: 129 AUD cases and 14 controls).45 We identified 282 significant mQTL-CpG pairs in AAs and 313 significant mQTL-CpG pairs in EAs. These findings suggest that genetic variants (particular noncoding variants) may influence gene transcription via regulation of CpG methylation levels.
