Correlation between band intensities and Phosphorimager quantification.

We confirmed the accuracy of our band quantification method by comparing our results with the Phosphorimager, whose sensitivity and reproducibility is comparable to scintillation counting.64About 50 bands from randomly chosen lanes were selected, and each of their intensities was quantified by eye, confirmed by a second investigator, and expressed as a single-digit numeric. The same gel was digitized by the Phosphorimager with 16-bit precision to form the image and analyzed by Imagequant software (Molecular Dynamics). We used the software program S-PLUS (Mathsoft, Cambridge, MA) for statistical analysis as described in “Materials and methods.” Dashed lines display the 95% CI.