Imagine your DNA as a set of shoelaces. Telomeres are like the plastic tips at the ends of those shoelaces, preventing them from fraying and unraveling. Structurally, telomeres are repetitive ...

With the aid of physics and a minuscule magnet, researchers have discovered a new structure of telomeric DNA. Telomeres are sometimes seen as the key to living longer. They protect genes from damage ...

Transposons are critical drivers of bacterial evolution that have been studied for many decades and have been the subject of Nobel Prize winning research. Now, researchers from Cornell University have ...

Telomere damage can lead to senescence, aging and aging-related disorders, and cancer. Previously, we reported that cell-free chromatin particles (cfChPs) that circulate in human blood can readily ...

Small plastic or metal bits at the end of shoelaces, known as aglets, prevent laces from unraveling and protect them from wear and tear. Similarly, chromosomes are capped by telomeres—specialized ...

In a study of 17 people from five families, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they found that ultra-lengthy DNA endcaps called telomeres fail to provide the longevity presumed for such people.

A day in the life of DNA can be rough. It gets yanked across a dividing cell, zapped by radiation, and assaulted by chemicals. Luckily, cells have developed a complex set of repair mechanisms to ...

Telomeres are one of the keys to aging. We’ve known this for decades, and the scientists who first figured it out won the Nobel Prize in 2009. (One of them was my former colleague at Johns Hopkins ...

Telomeres are nucleoprotein complexes at the ends of linear chromosomes. Their essential function is to protect the chromosome end from being sensed as a free end generated by a DNA double-strand ...

Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA that can be found at the ends of chromosomes, where they form a kind of protective cap. Telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides, and they are thought ...