Fig. 2:

Experimental design. 9 rats were treated with either ~25 mg/L EtOH vapor or room air for 8 hr/day for 3 weeks in vapor chambers. On the experimental day [2-¹³C]EtOH was infused via tail vein according to a pharmacologic model (Ramchandani & O’Connor 2006) to reach 21.7mM (100 mg/dL) plasma EtOH by 15 minutes and maintained for the rest of the 2-hour infusion, followed by euthanasia via focused microwave irradiation. During the infusion, blood samples were drawn from a saphenous vein at 5, 15, 30, 60, 90 and 120 minutes. Tissue and blood samples were prepared for NMR analysis. Brain metabolite ¹³C enrichments were normalized by the final plasma acetate enrichments.