Fig. 1

The present chronic alcohol feeding model is depicted in Panel (A). The experiment was conducted in both male wild-type (WT) ICR and Akr1a1^−/− mice; these mice were orally administrated two different treatments: the control pair-fed (PF) and alcohol-fed (AF) treatments. The alcohol feeding regimen was performed by a stepwise increase in the alcohol content to 5% in the first week and then maintained at that dose for seven weeks. After the treatment, the mouse livers were removed for analysis. The gross liver appearances of WT mice are shown in Panel (B) (scale = 1 cm). The liver tissue sections subjected to IHC staining for the AKR1A1 protein are shown in Panel (C) (scale bars = 100 μm). The liver protein lysates subjected to western blot analysis for the detection of AKR1A1 levels are shown in Panel (D), in which the quantification (right panel) was performed by β-actin normalization. Data are expressed as the means ± SD (n = 6), ***p < 0.001