Universal assay for measuring vertebrate telomeres by real-time quantitative PCR

The role of telomere dynamics in health and aging has been facilitated by the development of qPCR-based telomere length measurements. However, the widespread application of this approach has been limited because of the challenge of developing appropriate reference primers in non-model organisms with genomes that have not been sequenced. Here we develop reference primers to highly conserved DNA elements and validate their use in qPCR-based telomere length measurements across the vertebrate tree of life.