Real-time quantitative PCR in determination of telomere length

Objective Real-time quantitative PCR has been applied for measurement of telomere length.Methods Sixty-three samples of peripheral blood from healthy individuals were randomly selected for study. The relative T/S ratio of telomere length was measured by real-time quantitative PCR technique. The terminal restriction fragment (TRF) length of telomere DNA was measured by Southern blotting. The correlation between result of relative T/S ratio and mean TRF length was analyzed.Results The mean relative T/S ratio of telomere length was 0.76±0.27 and the mean TRF length was 9.20±1.12. The value of relative T/S ratio of telomere length was positively correlated with mean TRF length (R2=0.575,P0.01). Conclusion Real-time quantitative PCR has advantages of simplicity and rapidity and it is readily scalable to achieve a high throughput of samples. This method will facilitate the investigations on biology of telomeres and it plays an important role in study of molecular pathogenesis of cancer.