Syndromes of Telomere Shortening

Telomere shortening associated with disease evolution patterns in myelodysplastic syndromes.

We identified the telomere length at different hematological phases in 16 patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), showing disease evolution with a conventional Southern blot hybridization using the (TTAGGG)4 probe. The MDS patients studied were classified into three groups according to the pattern of telomere length reduction. The first group had telomere shortening at the time of diseas...

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...

Rapid telomere shortening in children.

Telomere shortening may reflect the total number of divisions experienced by a somatic cell and is associated with replicative senescence. We found that the average rate of telomere shortening in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) obtained longitudinally from nine different infants during the first 3 years of life (270 bp per year) is more than fourfold higher than in adults and does no...