“…Total RNA was extracted with Trizol reagent (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, USA) following the manufacturer's instructions. The RT reactions were performed using SuperScript II (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, USA) and Hot Star Taq DNA Polymerase (Qiagen Inc., Valencia, CA, USA) and genespecific primers (Yuan et al, 2001;Oka et al, 2002;Galm et al, 2003). Western blot analyses for protein expression were performed essentially as described previously (Shivapurkar et al, 2002b, c).…”