From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Mar 08 1999 - 06:57:02 MST
At 07:34 PM 3/7/99 -0700, you wrote:
>
>BOSTON -- Mice lacking a gene for making telomeres -- chromosomal elements
>with a conjectured but controversial role in aging and cancer -- were found
>to [blah blah]
This actually isn't directly all that interesting to humans. Standard mice
have unusually long telomeres, so even without telomerase to top up their
germ cells they manage to pass down enough for a few generations. The ones
in question are the sixth generation (I think) of a constructed knockout
mouse. This breed started running into trouble at gen 3, and was in deep
shit by gen 6. My surmise is that the consecutively truncated telomeres
finally hit an unviable brevity by then, and there was a cascade of
chromosomal damage.
A useful account (but partisan) of the telomeric hypothesis of aging can be
found on Tom Mahoney's site
http://home.earthlink.net/~excelife/index.html
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:16 MST