From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon May 01 2000 - 10:15:42 MDT
On Mon, 1 May 2000, John Clark wrote:
>
> I know, maybe that has something to do with the fact that mice as a species
> tend have very long telomeres, or maybe not. I did hear a rumor that cloned
> mice with unusually short telomeres lived as long as normal animals but
> were sterile, I don't know if it's true. Anybody know anything?
Relevent articles from PubMed would seem to be:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve?db=PubMed?list_uids=10089885?dopt=Abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve?db=PubMed?list_uids=9689036?dopt=Abstract
In particular:
"Interestingly, these mice could be bred for only four generations
and the survival of late generation mTR-/- mice decreased dramatically
with age as compared with their wild-type counterparts. Fifty percent
of the generation 4 mice die at only 5 months of age. This decreased
viability with age in the late generation mice is coincident with telomere
shortening, sterility, splenic atrophy, reduced proliferative capacity
of B and T cells, abnormal hematology and atrophy of the small intestine.
These results indicate that telomere shortening in mTR-/- mice leads to
progressive loss of organismal viability."
I note the pathologies occur primarily in tissues with dividing cells!
[Note: the NCBI PubMed abstract server seems down right now, so you may
want to try it later.]
If the URL's don't work, the query I did was "telomerase mice aging".
Robert
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