What are people referring to telomerase as?
UPDATE 3-U.S. trio wins medicine Nobel for ageing research Mon Oct 5, 2009 8:47am EDT * 3 Americans win prize for discovery of telomerase enzyme By Nicholas Vinocur STOCKHOLM, Oct 5 (Reuters) – Three Americans won the Nobel prize for medicine on Monday for discovering and identifying telomerase, the enzyme that renews the little caps on the end of chromosomes whose natural fraying underlies aging and cancer. Australian-born Elizabeth Blackburn, British-born Jack Szostak and Carol Greider won the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.42 million), Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said. “The discoveries…have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies,” it said. Blackburn, Greider and Szostak’s work laid the foundation for studies that have linked telomerase and telomeres to human cancer and age-related conditions. Work on the enzyme has become a hot area of drug research, particularly
Telomerase is an enzyme that adds specific DNA sequence repeats (“TTAGGG” in all vertebrates) to the 3′ end of DNA strands in the telomere regions, which are found at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. The telomeres contain condensed DNA material, giving stability to the chromosomes. The enzyme is a reverse transcriptase that carries its own RNA molecule, which is used as a template when it elongates telomeres, which are shortened after each replication cycle. Telomerase was discovered by Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn in 1985 in the ciliate Tetrahymena.[1] Together with Jack W. Szostak, Greider and Blackburn were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery. There are some indicators that telomerase is of retroviral origin. Function By using TERC, TERT can add a six-nucleotide repeating sequence, 5′-TTAGGG (in all vertebrates, the sequence differs in other organisms) to the 3′ strand of chromosomes. These TTAGGG repeats (with their various prot
Telomerase is an enzyme that adds specific DNA sequence repeats (“TTAGGG” in all vertebrates) to the 3′ end of DNA strands in the telomere regions, which are found at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. The telomeres contain condensed DNA material, giving stability to the chromosomes. The enzyme is a reverse transcriptase that carries its own RNA molecule, which is used as a template when it elongates telomeres, which are shortened after each replication cycle. Telomerase was discovered by Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn in 1985 in the ciliate Tetrahymena. Together with Jack W. Szostak, Greider and Blackburn were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery. There are some indicators that telomerase is of retroviral origin. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.
