Alcohol availability during withdrawal gates the impact of alcohol vapor exposure on responses to alcohol cues.

Rationale: Chronic intermittent ethanol (CIE) vapor inhalation is a widely used model of alcohol dependence, but the impact of CIE on cue-elicited alcohol seeking is poorly understood.

Objective: Here, we assessed the effects of CIE on alcohol-seeking elicited by cues paired with alcohol before or after CIE vapor inhalation.

Methods: In experiment 1, male and female Long-Evans rats were trained in a discriminative stimulus (DS) task, in which one auditory cue (the DS) predicts the availability of 15% ethanol and a control cue (the NS) predicts no ethanol.