Senescence, Telomere Shortening and Telomere Maintenance

Accelerated Telomere Shortening in Acromegaly; IGF-I Induces Telomere Shortening and Cellular Senescence

OBJECTIVE Patients with acromegaly exhibit reduced life expectancy and increased prevalence of age-related diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. However, the underlying mechanism has not been fully elucidated. Telomere shortening is reportedly associated with reduced life expectancy and increased prevalence of these age-related diseases. METHODS We measured tel...

Deregulated telomere transcription causes replication-dependent telomere shortening and promotes cellular senescence

Telomeres are transcribed into non-coding TElomeric Repeat containing RNAs (TERRA). We have employed a transcriptionally inducible telomere to investigate how telomere transcription affects telomere function in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We report that telomere shortening resulting from high levels of telomere transcription stems from a DNA replication-dependent loss of telomere tracts, which ca...

Telomere Shortening Mechanisms

Stochastic models of telomere shortening.

Shortening of chromosome ends, known as telomeres, is one of the supposed mechanisms of cellular aging and death. We provide a probabilistic analysis of the process of loss of telomere ends. The first work concerned with that issue is the paper by Levy et al. [J. Molec. Biol. 225 (1992) 951-960]. Their deterministic model reproduced the observed frequencies of viable cells in the in vitro exper...

Telomere shortening & metabolic/vascular diseases.

Telomeres are specialized DNA-protein structures located at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes whose length is progressively reduced in most somatic cells during ageing. Over the past decade, emerging evidence has shown that the telomeres are essential regulators of cellular life span and chromosome integrity in a dynamic fashion. By inducing genomic instability, replicative senescence and apop...