The little tips of chromosomes get shorter every time a cell divides, and this shortening is a mark of cellular aging. If they get short enough, the cell dies or stops dividing. Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her studies on telomeres with colleagues Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, has spent the better part of her career trying to figure out why. In recent years, Blackburn has expanded on that initial work to show that these gauges of cellular health serve as barometers of environmental and emotional stress and predictors of various diseases. In this expansion of an interview in the October issue of Scientific American, Blackburn talks about additional ways that this research has started to branch out.

Most of your studies look at telomere length in white-blood cells, but you've started looking at cells in saliva. Why?
We're involved in a very large study that's federally funded and being done with Kaiser Permanente, and saliva is a very non-invasive way to get cells from the body. UCSF [University of California, San Francisco]'s Institute for Human Genetics is participating, too, looking at genome-sequence variations. We're collecting about 100,000 telomere lengths in saliva samples and then looking at how those relate to both the extensive longitudinal clinical records that Kaiser is collecting and the genome sequence variations. This will eventually become a publicly available database. The first stage of the study, genotyping the DNA and measuring the telomere lengths, was completed in July.

I understand your new UCSF robot, called ATLAS (the Automated Telomere Length Analysis System), is being used for that giant study, as it can measure several thousand samples a day as opposed to the hundred you could do before. What's the timetable on the database?
Well, it's not going to be next week, that's for sure. We're still refining and getting our data sets. Basically, in the next few years.

What do the telomere lengths of white blood cells, which are dividing cells, tell us about what's happening in non-dividing cells, such as heart-muscle cells? In other words, what can they tell us about the health status of the entire person?
Well, first of all, it's hard to look at non-dividing cells in people because the heart cells and the brain cells—people have a way of wanting to hang onto them. Can't imagine why! So, for ethical reasons, you don't look at them in humans. Basically, when you look at different types of cells, such as fibroblasts, which form connective tissue, or epithelial cells, from saliva, you see general correlations within a person. If telomeres are up for one cell type, they're up for others overall. What we don't know yet, because the data sets have mostly been collected on blood cells, is which will turn out to be better in terms of predictive power for disease risk. 

6 Comments

1. 1. jime23 08:38 PM 9/21/11

   I'm a journalist covering telomeres for the general public. One of the dimensions that I've been extremely fascinated by in my research is the connection between your environment and the state of your telomeres. A recent Glasgow study--a hugely important project-- splashed into medical discourse when it talked about how different social factors like socio-economics and dietary practices affected the cellular structures of participants, namely their telomere lengths, which can reflect poor overall health. From an cultural perspective, telomeres science will surely prove to be a profound lens.
   
   -Jaime A.
   # AgeMarker.com

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2. 2. theasinger 06:59 AM 9/23/11

   Hi, Jaime:
   The evidence for how particular lifestyle behaviors relate to telomere length -- both in their shortening and lengthening -- is growing exponentially. I write about a lot of these in my book, Stress Less, and am perpetually on the lookout for more. A recent one that Liz Blackburn mentioned to me that didn't make it into this article because of space linked length of time children had been in an orphanage with shorter telomeres. Exercise correlates with longer telomeres, as does levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the blood. This is why companies are launching to measure telomere length -- to give us a window into our over general health and cellular aging patterns.

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3. 3. BrainWorld 01:44 AM 10/6/11

   You had space limitations for this article? But it's so short! This fascinating topic deserves much more space, come on the electrons are practically free...

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4. 4. Rev.Corvette 11:25 AM 10/17/11

   Why do I suspect research into the connection between our environment and the state of our telomeres will reveal more favorable results for wealthy non-smokers who exercise than for hard drinking overweight bikers that have exhausted their unemployment benefits?

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5. 5. theasinger in reply to BrainWorld 09:20 AM 10/18/11

   Ah, I would love to write more and more on this topic! Thanks for your note!

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6. 6. BatterseaBob 10:55 AM 11/25/11

   I suppose I'm an old cynic. But I do wonder about objectivity here: and not so much that Blackburn has an interest in a commercial company involved in telomere research (which is clearly acknowledged). What bothers me is whether some "product placement" is creeping in (clearer in the printed version). Why are two Axygen products (and no others) so prominently placed in the photo? And another rather more subliminally but still legibly on the top shelf. I expect I need a holiday.

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