*2.12. Statistical Analysis*

Data in the article and in the figures are represented as mean ± standard deviation. We used a Student's *t*-test statistics (two-tailed, unpaired) to perform comparison between means of di fferent groups, where we assumed that elements in each group are normally distributed. In performing the test, the null hypothesis is that the means between pairs of samples are equal. Everywhere in the text and the figures the di fference between two subsets of data is considered statistically significant if the Student's *t*-test gives a significant level *p* (*p* value) less than 0.05.
