Alcohol Consumption Effects During the Inflammatory Stage of Fracture Healing in Rat Bones

Sprague-Dawley rats were placed on an ethanol-containing or pair-fed Lieber and DeCarli diets for 4 wks prior to surgical fracture. Following insertion of a medullary pin, a closed mid-diaphyseal fracture was induced using a Bonnarens and Einhorn fracture device. At 3 days post-fracture, the region of the fracture calluses were harvested from the right hind-limb. RNA was extracted and microarray analysis was conducted against the entire rat genome to study the effects of alcohol-consumption on the fracture healing. The experiments were on four rat subjects, i.e., pair-fed rats with subsequent surgical fracture or no surgical fracture, and alcohol-fed rats with subsequent surgical fracture or no surgical fracture. Each rat subject described above has three replicates so 6 kinds of pairing can be made and each pairing has a dye-swap replicate (thus, a total 12 array experiments). The focus of this study is on the pair-fed fracture subject vs. alcohol-fed fracture subject.