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Protect Your Chromosome Telomeres

Naturally by Encouraging Telomerase
Production

In October of 2009, the medical world awoke to the news that the 2009 Nobel Prize in
Medicine had been awarded jointly to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and
Jack W. Szostak for the discovery of “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and
the enzyme telomerase.”

That this trio was being recognized for one of the most important genetic discoveries of
the past half century was hardly a shock. Instead, what was surprising was the fact that
it took the Nobel Committee so long to come to that conclusion.

It was back in 1982, nearly thirty years ago, when Blackburn and Szostak first presented
their findings that telomeres, the DNA “caps” on the end of chromosomes, protect cells
when they divide. And it was back in 1984 that Greider and Blackburn identified
telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA.

In the time since these initial breakthrough discoveries, scientists the world over have
been studying telomeres and the role they play in human aging. What they have found
will soon revolutionize human health, and they have already identified steps you can
take right now to take advantage of the Nobel Prize winning discovery of telomeres.

What are telomeres and why are they important?

Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequences at the ends of all chromosomes. They protect
and separate one chromosome from another in the DNA sequence. Blackburn says
telomeres effectively “cap” the end of a chromosome in a manner similar to the way the
plastic on the ends of our shoelaces “caps” and protects the shoelaces from unraveling.

In humans, every cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46. Each
chromosome contains DNA (the building block of life) along with hundreds of genes.
Telomeres separate each of these chromosomes from each other.
But what is really interesting about telomeres, and the reason you should be aware of
them, is that they appear to be the “clock” that regulates how many times an individual
cell can divide.

What happens is this ... each time a cell divides, the telomeric sequence on each end of
the chromosome in the cell gets a little bit shorter. Once the telomere shrinks to a
certain level, the cell can no longer divide and the cell dies. What this means is that
most cells can divide only a certain number of times, growing older each time they do
so. This is human aging at the cellular level and why scientists are excited about the
possibility of slowing down or even stopping the telomere shortening process.

Scientists now know that telomere length is an early indication of disease risk,
progression, and premature mortality in humans.

Shortened telomeres are a precursor to the initiation of many types of diseases including
cancer and coronary heart disease.1

Protecting your telomeres

Clearly, if you could stop your telomeres from shrinking after cell division, you could
slow down the aging process and protect yourself from disease. The good news is there
are a number of ways to do just that.

If you promote the production of telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomeres in the
body, you can slow the rate of telomere degradation and even reverse it. In other words,
if short telomeres are the problem, then telomerase may be one of the solutions.

In the laboratory, scientists have introduced telomerase into cells in tissue culture and
extended the length of their telomeres. These cells then divided for 250 generations past
the time they normally would stop dividing, and are continuing to divide normally,
giving rise to normal cells with the normal number of chromosomes.2 By extending the
telomeres with telomerase, the “mortal” cell has become immortal!

Now imagine if you could promote the production of telomerase in your healthy cells.
You could theoretically slow down the aging process. This is something scientists are
actively working on.