Monthly Archives: January 2018
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- 一月 08, 2018
Aging and Telomere Length Quantification by qPCR
Aging is a time-dependent decline of the body’s functional capabilities and is an inevitable course of life (as shown in the image below, extracted from the Wall Street Journal). The rate of aging though is highly variable among individuals. When evaluating health status, the virtual (biological) age and actual (chronological) age are both important. For this reason, scientists have long searched for reliable biomarkers of aging to determine biological age. Currently, there is no well-accepted aging biomarker that has been identified.
Among several potential aging biomarkers, telomere length has attracted the most attention. Telomeres are repetitive nucleotide elements at the ends of chromosomes and protect chromosomes from degradation and genetic information loss. In vertebrates, telomeres are GGATTT nucleotide repeats that can reach a few kilobases in length on each chromosomal end. Notably, cells lose part of telomeres
