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Scaled digital images of 5-^m-thick paraffin sections of seminiferous tubules from these animals were captured on a Zeiss Axio-scop 2 equipped with an AxiocamMR camera, and the peripheral outline of selected tubules was traced and the profile areas determined using the appropriate measurement tool available in Version 3.1 of the Axiovision Imaging Software (Carl Zeiss Canada Ltd., Montreal, QC). In all cases, only those seminiferous tubules showing a near-perfect transverse plane of section were measured, and a minimum of 150 tubular cross-sectional profiles were outlined in sections from animals of a given age and treatment group. Preliminary analyses of the data indicated that profile areas of the seminiferous tubules were not distributed along a normal curve in either the wild-type or the FORKO mice, and log10 transformations of raw data had to be done in order to obtain normal distributions. These transformations and subsequent univariate factorial ANOVA test and post hoc unequal N HSD /-tests were done using Version 6.1 of STATISTICA for Windows (Statsoft, Inc., Tulsa, OK); P values < 0.05 were considered significant.