In article <2970ri$89 at darkstar.UCSC.EDU>, beckman at cats.ucsc.edu (Thomas
J Beckma
n) writes:
>>I've heard that the number of base pairs per turn of human
>DNA decreases with ageing. I'm looking for references about this.
>Thanks for any information.
>>>--
>Tom Beckman
>beckman at cats.ucsc.edu
I saw a talk by Dr. Hayflick of UCSF over the summer, and at the end
of the talk he informed us that there is a sequence repeated at the end of
each chromosome. I don't remember the exact pattern (something like
TTAGG), but it doesn't really matter.
The important thing is that this sequence was repeated a large number of
times in young cells (on the order of 100 times?). In older cells,
however, this sequence is repeated less. He suggested that the older a
cell, the less this sequence is repeated at the end of the chromosome.
He said that current research is looking into whether this is a
significant finding concerning cellular aging or merely a coincidence.
Has anyone else heard of this? Has there been any progress on this research?
-Todd-
tkw at leland.stanford.edu
