PURPOSE Telomere length plays an important role in chromosomal stability and tumorigenesis, and its measurement in peripheral white blood cell DNA may be a predictor of the development of lung cancer. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Using a new method - monochrome multiplex quantitative PCR - which reduces measurement variability, we compared telomere length relative to standard DNA in white blood cell D...

High telomerase activity is a characteristic of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), however, the regulation and maintenance of correct telomere length in hESCs is unclear. In this study we investigated telomere elongation in hESCs in vitro and found that telomeres lengthened from their derivation in blastocysts through early expansion, but stabilized at later passages. We report that the core u...

Removal of a telomere from yeast chromosome VII in a strain having two copies of this chromosome often results in its loss. Here we show that there are three pathways that can stabilize this broken chromosome: homologous recombination, nonhomologous end joining, and de novo telomere addition. Both in a wild-type and a recombination deficient rad52 strain, most stabilization events were due to h...

While global chromatin conformation studies are emerging, very little is known about the chromatin conformation of human telomeres. Most studies have focused on the role of telomeres as a tumor suppressor mechanism. Here we describe how telomere length regulates gene expression long before telomeres become short enough to produce a DNA damage response (senescence). We directly mapped the intera...

INTRODUCTION Telomere shortening is associated with a number of common age-related diseases. A role of telomere shortening in osteoarthritis (OA) has been suggested, mainly based on the assessment of mean telomere length in ex vivo expanded chondrocytes. We addressed this role directly in vivo by using a newly developed assay, which measures specifically the load of ultra-short single telomeres...

Telomeres shorten with age, which may be linked to genomic instability and an increased risk of cancer. To explore this association, we analyzed telomere length in normal colorectal tissue of individuals at different ages using quantitative-fluorescence in situ hybridization (Q-FISH) and quantitative-PCR (Q-PCR). Using Q-FISH, we also examined the histologically normal epithelium adjacent to, o...

AIM The aim of the study was to examine the association between telomere erosion and periodontitis in a long-standing prospective cohort study of New Zealand adults. Specific hypotheses tested were as follows: (i) that exposure to periodontitis at ages 26 and 38 was associated with accelerated leucocyte telomere erosion and (ii) that accelerated leucocyte telomere erosion was associated with hi...

OBJECTIVE Abuse victimization in childhood is associated with a variety of age-related cardiometabolic diseases, but the mechanisms remain unknown. Telomeres, which form the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes, have been proposed as measures of biological age, and a growing body of research suggests that telomere attrition may help to explain relationships between stress and cardiometabo...

Upon re-examination of large telomere datasets from healthy human populations, a downward secular trend in telomere length at birth was found. The authors theorized that relatively recent environmental stresses to female germ cells could have driven the observed intergenerational telomere erosion; otherwise, these trends would have pushed populations into pathological telomere length ranges wit...

During meiotic prophase, telomeres cluster, forming the bouquet chromosome arrangement, and facilitate homologous chromosome pairing. In fission yeast, bouquet formation requires switching of telomere and centromere positions. Centromeres are located at the spindle pole body (SPB) during mitotic interphase, and upon entering meiosis, telomeres cluster at the SPB, followed by centromere detachme...