An alcohol withdrawal test battery measuring multiple behavioral symptoms in mice.

Despite acceptance that risk for alcohol-use disorder (AUD) has a large genetic component, the identification of genes underlying various components of risk for AUD has been hampered in humans, in part by the heterogeneity of expression of the phenotype. One aspect of AUD is physical dependence. Alcohol withdrawal is a serious consequence of alcohol dependence with multiple symptoms, many of which are seen in multiple species, and can be experienced over a wide-ranging time course.

High Drinking in the Dark (HDID) mice are sensitive to the effects of some clinically relevant drugs to reduce binge-like drinking.

Background: There is a serious public health need for better understanding of alcohol use disorder disease mechanisms and for improved treatments. At this writing, only three drugs are approved by the Food and Drug Administration as medications to treat alcohol use disorders - disulfiram, naltrexone, and acamprosate. Binge drinking is a form of abusive alcohol drinking defined by the NIAAA as a drinking to blood alcohol levels (BALs)>0.

Ethanol drinking in withdrawal seizure-prone and -resistant selected mouse lines.

Withdrawal Seizure-Prone (WSP) and Withdrawal Seizure-Resistant (WSR) mouse lines were bidirectionally selectively bred, respectively, to have severe or mild ethanol withdrawal handling-induced convulsions (HICs) after cessation of 3 days of ethanol vapor inhalation. Murine genotypes with severe withdrawal have been found to show low ethanol consumption, and high consumers show low withdrawal. An early drinking study with WSP and WSR mice showed modest evidence consistent with this genetic correlation, but there were several limitations to that experiment.

Ethanol Withdrawal-Associated Drinking and Drinking in the Dark: Common and Discrete Genetic Contributions.

Individual mice differ in the dose of ethanol they will ingest voluntarily when it is offered during limited access periods in the circadian dark, a phenotype called drinking in the dark (DID). Substantial genetic variation in DID has been reported across a few standard inbred mouse strains, and a line of High Drinking in the Dark (HDID) mice has been established through selective breeding on the blood ethanol concentration (BEC) they attain at the end of a drinking session. Here, we report ethanol DID data for 23 inbred mouse strains, including 11 not previously reported, corroborating the genetic contributions to this trait.

Intermittent availability of ethanol does not always lead to elevated drinking in mice.

Aims: Intermittent access (IA) to an alcohol (ethanol) solution can lead rats to higher ethanol intakes than continuous access, and a recent report showed increased drinking in C57BL/6J mice offered 20% ethanol vs. water 3X/week (Prior studies have offered ethanol during 24 h periods, either continuously or intermittently.).

Ethanol sensitivity in high drinking in the dark selectively bred mice.

Background: Mouse lines are being selectively bred in replicate for high blood ethanol concentrations (BECs) achieved after a short period of ethanol (EtOH) drinking early in the circadian dark phase. High Drinking in the Dark-1 (HDID-1) mice were in selected generation S18, and the replicate HDID-2 line in generation S11.

Methods: To determine other traits genetically correlated with high DID, we compared naïve animals from both lines with the unselected, segregating progenitor stock, HS/Npt.