Telomeres are sections of DNA that are found at the ends of chromosomes and seem to play a role in aging.
Telomeres are the"caps" that protect the ends of DNA strands from being destroyed by a cell. They are made up of areas of repeated DNA sequences combined with specific proteins at the ends of chromosomes — the tightly wound structures of DNA and proteins inside cells. Telomeres play a role in how fast cells age, though exactly how isn't totally clear.
Each time a cell divides, some part of the repeating sequence in a telomere is lost. When telomeres become too short to function effectively, a cell either dies or stops dividing. So because most cells cannot regenerate their telomeres, they become shorter as people age. The rate at which telomeres shorten has also been associated with rates of aging.
Telomeres and agingMost cells cannot regenerate their telomeres, causing them to become shorter over the lifetime of both a cell and an organism."Telomere shortening really sets a life span on our cells by limiting the number of population doublings or proliferation cells can undergo," Karlseder said.
A 2021 study in the journal GeroScience posits that the consequences of telomere length could impact how old a person looks. Researchers examined survey results from over 400,000 participants in the UK Biobank, a large database of health information from people living in the United Kingdom. They found that people who had genetic predictors of longer telomere length were more likely to say that people tended to think they looked younger than their age.
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