Center Line Newsletter

Volume 18, Number 2, June 2007

Director's Column

Dr. Fulton T. Crews
Director, Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies

This issue of the Center Line highlights two laboratories that are using cutting edge technologies to better understand how alcohol affects the brain. Kathy Sulik’s team is leading a research effort to understand the effects of ethanol on fetal brain using imaging technology that could change the diagnosis and treatment of fetal alcohol exposed babies. Studies have found that ethanol can increase fetal cell death, particularly targeting neural crest cells. The effects of ethanol are dependent upon the fetal stage of development, broadening the spectrum of abnormalities and making specific markers difficult. Ethanol-induced effects, including cell death, change the course of brain development in a manner that is not well understood. Further, although ethanol insults the brain at all stages of fetal development, the facial abnormalities associated with fetal alcohol syndrome develop only during first trimester exposure.

The Sulik group is pioneering the use of brain imaging to explore more detailed pathology as well as delayed aspects of brain dysmorphology resulting from earlier exposure. Dr. Sulik is focusing these studies in mice where ethanol consumption, genetics, nutrition and other variables can be controlled. These studies will provide new insights on brain morphology and development. This is particularly exciting since human brain imaging is well ahead of mouse brain imaging. Sulik’s controlled experimental dysmorphology will be readily translated to human findings to determine if brain imaging can be used to establish insults in brain and develop targeted therapy.

Similarly, Dr. Donita Robinson is developing new methodologies to understand how the brain directs behavior. We know that dopamine is a key transmitter involved in attention, reward and learning. Using multiple arrays, electrochemical detection and behavioral analysis, she will dissect the underlying changes in brain that drive ethanol-induced behaviors. This is challenging but could provide the basis for investigating drugs that block pathological ethanol-induced behaviors.

This is an exciting time in brain research. Kathy Sulik’s efforts to follow brain dysmorphology could lay the foundation for new diagnostic and therapeutic efforts to make children healthy. Donita Robinson may find why people lose control over their behavior when addicted and develop strategies to help them regain control.