Commentary: will analyzing the epigenome yield cohesive principles of ethanol teratology?

This commentary discusses the impact of the manuscript by Zhou et al., titled "Alcohol Alters DNA Methylation Patterns and Inhibits Neural Stem Cell Differentiation," published in the April 2011 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research (volume 35, issue 4, pages 1-12). In this manuscript, the authors present intriguing evidence from a genome scale analysis of promoter DNA methylation patterns in a class of neural crest stem cells associated with dorsal root ganglia, showing that ethanol essentially prevents epigenetic programming associated with neural stem cell differentiation. This manuscript presents several interesting and novel pieces of data and raises important questions for future research. The implications of these data for our understanding of the etiology of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders are discussed.