Gluon Virtuality and Heavy Sea Quark Contributions to the Spin-Dependent g₁ Structure Function

We analyze the quark mass dependence of photon gluon fusion in polarized deep inelastic scattering for both the intrinsic and extrinsic gluon distributions of the nucleon. We calculate the effective number of flavors for each of the heavy and light quark photon gluon fusion contributions to the first moment of the spin-dependent structure function $g_1(x)$.