This highlights the relevance of the present method and its utility for research efforts involving small amounts of sample material, from human cancer samples to mouse models of disease, and its applicability to the immunoblot evaluation of steady-state relative protein expression levels in samples from multiple sources, following prolonged storage.
The positive experimental control was deliberately performed on day 7, after testing the 0 h and 24 h WT and -PPO samples to avoid mice preference habituation to either of the two food containers locations.
Fold difference was represented by the ratio of the normalized value of each sample to that of mouse β-actin.
With the cDNA array data, one needs roughly 5 times as many human samples relative to mouse to detect the same magnitude of change with the same statistical power at the same significance level.
To account for this variability, we down-sampled each mouse tissue sample to 25 million reads (random sampling, no replacement) and subsequent datasets were used for DNase I peak and hotspot calling.
The S.E.M. shown in Figure 1 represents the variation from sample to sample (i.e. inter-mouse variation).
The numbers represent significantly upregulated genes in rat samples (in vitro) compared to mouse samples (in vivo).
Even though our typical sample size for zoanthids collected in this study was small (0.2 0.8 g/sample), we calculate that we extracted enough crude toxin from these combined samples to kill 300,000 mice (approx. 2 mg crude toxin calculated by HPLC, standard mouse size of 20 g).
To sample mice blood, the animals were slightly sedated with halothane (Zeneca, São Paulo, Brazil), and blood was collected by puncturing the retro-orbital plexus with a glass microhematocrit tubes.
Although we were unable to sample mice from facility C, it is likely that the outbreak strain was the same as in facility A and was introduced during the wild mouse infestation that had occurred.
