Blood cell telomere lengths and shortening rates of chimpanzee and human females.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Slower rates of aging distinguish humans from our nearest living cousins. Chimpanzees rarely survive their forties while large fractions of women are postmenopausal even in high-mortality hunter-gatherer populations. Cellular and molecular mechanisms for these somatic aging differences remain to be identified, though telomeres might play a role. To find out, we compared telomere lengths across age-matched samples of female chimpanzees and women.

Methods

We used a monochrome multiplex quantitative polymerase chain reaction to assay canonical telomere repeats in blood cells from captive female chimpanzees (65 individuals; age: 6.2-56.7 years) and compared them to the same measure in human females (43 individuals; age: 7.4-57.3 years).

Results

Our samples show

SUBMITTER: Tackney J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4352344 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul-Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature