In a preliminary studywe examined the effect of the number of PCR
cycles on the intensity of the ladder bands. The intensity of bands
increased in the range of 0–40 cycles indicating that the PCR did not
reach a plateau at 26 cycles in this experiment justifying the use of
band intensity for quantification of telomerase activity. The intensity of
the internal PCR control bandwas not affected by telomerase activities
of the samples. Thus competition between the telomerase products
and internal controls for primers was negligible in this experiment