Associate Professor Peter Dodd and his team from UQ's School of Molecular and Microbial Sciences has secured a five-year, $1.23 million grant from the United States' biomedical funding arm, the National Institute of Health (NIH) to find out.Chronic alcohol abuse kills brain cells in the front of the brain, which affect planning, and social interactions and inhibitions.The UQ team with collaborators from The University of Texas, want to find out what makes these cells so vulnerable.Professor Dodd said his team was analysing brain tissue from dead alcoholics, mostly Anglo-Celtic men who've averaged more than 10 drinks a day.The group analyses samples using a microarray analysis, a process they pioneered with human brain samples in 2000.From a DNA sample applied to a microscope slide, the microarray computer produces about 50,000 coloured spots showing which genes are expressed or switched on in the sample.“What we're trying to find out is, what's different in the superior frontal cortex [front of brain] when you compare alcoholics with controls, that's not different in a spared area of the brain,” Dr Dodd said.