Developmental high binge ethanol exposure does not alter the transcriptome of visual cortical microglia as determined by mature mRNA RNA sequencing

This RNA-seq data was generated to determine the effects of developmental ethanol exposure on the microglial transcriptome in the visual cortex during adolescence. This data reveals that there were no significant differences in expression levels for any of the genes detected, despite the reliable data quality and the fact that the most highly expressed genes detected were in fact also shown by other studies to be highly expressed by microglia. Therefore, this data lends strong support to the conclusion that the phenotype of microglia in adolescent mouse visual cortex after developmental ethanol exposure is remarkably similar to the phenotype of comparable microglia in controls, and suggest that early ethanol exposure has limited effects on visual cortical microglia long-term. We examined 9 different samples of adolescent visual cortex microglia, freshly isolated from male C57BL/6 adolescent mice via fluorescence assisted cell sorting and lysed directly into RNA preserving buffer upon collection. Mice from which the samples were obtained were either exposed to high binge levels of ethanol (n=4) or equivalent volumes of saline (n=5) daily from P4-P9 via dorsal subcutaneous injections. Microglia were identified as the propidium iodide negative (live) CD11b positive CD45 low expressing cell population, using an identical gating strategy for all samples.