... and I recall there were "researchers" saying in their pooh-pooh posts "why Jerry Shay is wrong" ... lol
... science moves on ... enjoy.
" Regulation of the Human Telomerase Gene TERT by Telomere Position Effect—Over Long Distances (TPE-OLD): Implications for Aging and Cancer "
http://journals.plos...al.pbio.2000016
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Author Summary
Telomerase is very tightly regulated in large, long-lived species such as humans. Telomerase is expressed during early human fetal development, turned off in most adult tissues, and then becomes reactivated in most human cancers. However, the exact mechanism(s) regulating these switches in expression are not fully known. We recently described a phenomenon in which genes near chromosome ends (telomeres) are regulated by telomere length-dependent loops (telomere position effect—over long distances; TPE-OLD). Interestingly, the TERT gene is only a megabase from the human chromosome 5p end. We observed that when telomeres are long, TERT gene expression is repressed and the 5p sub-telomeric region and the TERT locus are spatially co-localized. When telomeres are short, at least one of the TERT alleles is spatially separated from the telomere, developing more active histone marks and changes in DNA methylation in the TERT promoter region. These findings have implications for how cells turn off telomerase when telomeres are long during human fetal development and how cancer cells reactivate telomerase in cells that have short telomeres. These studies add to the growing support for the role of telomeres in regulating gene expression via TPE-OLD. Furthermore, telomere length may be one of the mechanisms of how cells time changes in physiology without initiating a DNA damage response.
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