Construct · 1 fields · 4 citations

telomere: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct Nearest construct by meaningtelomerasecompare the meanings
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telomere1 CONSTRUCTTelomereMULLER · CHROMOSOME CAP

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Genetics

The protective repeat-DNA cap at a chromosome's end

The geneticist Hermann J. Muller coined the term telomere in 1938, from the Greek telos (end) and meros (part), to name the specialised structure that seals the natural end of a chromosome and keeps it from fusing with broken chromosome ends, and Barbara McClintock's parallel maize work in 1941 showed that chromosomes lacking such ends were unstable and cycled through breakage and fusion. A telomere is the region of repetitive DNA and its bound proteins that caps each chromosome tip: in humans it is thousands of copies of the short sequence TTAGGG held by a protein complex that hides the end from the cell's DNA-damage repair machinery. Elizabeth Blackburn and Joseph Gall first read out this repeated end sequence in the pond organism Tetrahymena in 1978, and in 1985 Carol Greider and Blackburn identified telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds telomeric repeats and offsets the small loss of end sequence that ordinary DNA copying leaves behind each division. What marks the telomere as a landmark is that one physical structure ties together several processes at once: chromosome stability, the finite number of times most human cells divide, and the enzymatic maintenance that stem cells, germ cells, and many cancers rely on to keep dividing.[1][2][3][4]

Unit
A structural region at each chromosome end, quantified as telomere length in base pairs or repeat count
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Measured as telomere length by terminal restriction fragment Southern blot, quantitative PCR (the T/S ratio), or in situ fluorescence (Q-FISH), and localised cytogenetically to chromosome ends

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Nearby constructs

senescence4 fields · 7 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsaging4 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, four constructstelomerase1 fields · 3 citationsanchor · a standalone construct

References

  1. Muller, H. J. (1938). The remaking of chromosomes. The Collecting Net, 13, 181–198.
  2. McClintock, B. (1941). The stability of broken ends of chromosomes in Zea mays. Genetics, 26(2), 234–282. https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/26.2.234
  3. Blackburn, E. H., & Gall, J. G. (1978). A tandemly repeated sequence at the termini of the extrachromosomal ribosomal RNA genes in Tetrahymena. Journal of Molecular Biology, 120(1), 33–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-2836(78)90294-2
  4. Greider, C. W., & Blackburn, E. H. (1985). Identification of a specific telomere terminal transferase activity in Tetrahymena extracts. Cell, 43(2), 405–413. https://doi.org/10.1016/0092-8674(85)90170-9

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