X-Message-Number: 25386 From: Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 10:13:34 EST Subject: Basie, your telomeres are getting shorter >Bill Walker just show us your graph. Maybe you don't have one. There are hundreds of papers on Pubmed with telomere length information on different animals. Many of them show the length on the actual TRF gels, not just on graphs. But the graph that you describe would make no sense: >It would not be difficult to compare the telemeres of a large number of different animal species (whose ages are known) with their age. One should be able to draw a graph that shows this correlation. As I explained in my earlier post, rodent and lagomorph telomeres do not shorten. Thus there is no correlation with their age, and comparing them with non-telomerase-expressing species would yield no information. Other species have different average telomere lengths, and individual animals have different telomere lengths at the beginning of life. There are numerous papers showing shortening of average telomere length betweeen young and old animals of the same species, and large-mammal somatic cells growing in culture show shortening over time. Hope this clears things up... if not, you know where Pubmed is. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25386