RTPCR was conducted and quantified as previously described [Bradley et al., 2005; Philibert et al., 2007b,c]. Briefly, the quantification of 5HTT was conducted using a commercially available primer probe set whose probe bridges exons 8 and 9 (ABI, Hs00169010) and a specially synthesized primer probe set whose probe recognizes transcripts containing exons 1 and 2 described previously [Philibert et al., 2007a]. The levels of these transcripts and the housekeeping control transcripts, GAPDH (ABI, Taqman® GAPDH Control Kit) and LDHA (ABI, Hs 00855332, endogenous controls), were performed using Taqman™ Universal PCR master mix and a ABI 7900 HT sequence detection system. All samples were measured in duplicate. Relative levels of each of these transcripts were determined by the comparative CT method using LDHA and GAPDH as normalizing controls after all values were transformed into Z-scores. Correlation co-efficient for sample duplicates for the 5HTT exon 1, 5HTT exon 8, GAPDH, and LDHA were 0.79, 0.98, 0.93, and 0.91, respectively.
