Telomere And Telomeres

Each of our bodies are made up trillions of cells, which each contain two meters worth of DNA wound into chromosomes. These structures define who we are and what we look like. They are essential for our health and all of our body functions. An important piece of our chromosomes,that are often forgotten, are telomeres. Telomeres are caps on the end of the chromosomes that keeps the strand together. They are like aglets, the plastic at the end of a shoe lace that keeps the shoe lace tied together and keeps it from fraying. Telomeres are composed of repeating nucleotide sequence. In vertebrates the repeating nucleotide sequence is TTAGGG and can be repeated around 2,500 times.They protect chromosomes from not only deteriorating but also joining

Geneticist Richard Cawthon at the University of Utah has been looking at telomeres and their affect on our aging. He has been asking questions like “If we lengthen our telomeres can we in turn lengthen our lifespan” but also wonders “ If we do so will it increase our risk for cancer or other disorders”. In the lab they have been successful in keeping cells alive far longer than their normal limit with the use of telomerase and surprisingly they did not become cancerous. This opens many doors for massive cell transplantation, like producing muscle cells for someone with muscular dystrophy or insulin producing cells for someone with diabetes. Cawthon research also revealed that people with longer telomeres live at least five years longer compared to someone with short telomeres. However this still doesn’t answer all the questions about aging.When a person reaches the age of 60 it is said that there risk of dying doubles every year after that. Cawthon further discovered that this increase in death is only partially telomeres fault. Other main factors that affect our age is oxidative stress, glycation,chronological age, and various genes (Are Telomeres The Key To Aging And

A report recently published by the American Cancer Society stated “About 1,685,210 new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in 2016”. However some new studies may have found the light at the end of the tunnel, telomeres. People with dyskeratosis congenita (as described above) have 1000 fold increased risk to get oral cancer. This theory of the linkage between telomere length and cancer came around in the 90’s but only just recently became provable. In a majority of cancer it was proven that many cells had critically shorter telomere length leading to unstable chromosomes. When a cell becomes cancerous, their chromosomes become unstable and uncontrollable. The cells continue to divide until the telomere becomes very short but what differs cancer cells from healthy cells is telomerase, which will maintain the cells telomere length and prevent death. Scientist believe if they can measure telomeres length and block telomerase they can predict and stop the cancer cell growth. In a recent experiment on mice with breast cancer, scientist were able to block telomerase and stop the growth of the cancer. However it had side effects like impaired fertility, wound healing, and production of blood cells and immune system cells(Are Telomeres The Key To Aging And Cancer?). Telomerase targeting could be the answer we are searching for but additional research is needed to further establish the exact roles