Quick Answer: What Is The Role Of Telomerase?

Telomerase is a cellular reverse transcriptase that helps to provide genomic stability in highly proliferative normal, immortal, and tumor cells by maintaining the integrity of the chromosome ends, the telomeres. The activity of telomerase is associated with the majority of malignant human cancers.

What does a telomerase do?

Telomerase, also called telomere terminal transferase, is an enzyme made of protein and RNA subunits that elongates chromosomes by adding TTAGGG sequences to the end of existing chromosomes. Telomerase is found in fetal tissues, adult germ cells, and also tumor cells.

What is telomerase and why is it important?

The enzyme telomerase adds TTAGGG repeats onto mammalian telomeres, which prevents their shortening. The activation of telomerase in malignant cancers seems to be an important step in tumorigenesis, whereby the cell gains the ability of indefinite proliferation to become immortal.

What is the role of telomeres and telomerase?

Telomere shortening can be overcome by telomerase enzyme activity that is undetectable in somatic cells, while being active in germline cells, stem cells, and immune cells. Telomeres are bound by a shelterin complex that regulates telomere lengthening as well as protects them from being identified as DNA damage sites.

What is the role of telomerase quizlet?

Telomerase allows for telomere length and equilibrium maintenance by adding on repeats to the end of the chromosome. This template region can be used to add to the ends of the chromosomes.

What are telomeres and why are they important how does telomerase play a role?

Telomeres are repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of chromosomes. Their function is to protect the ends of the chromosomes from deterioration or fusion to other chromosomes during cell division. An enzyme called telomerase is responsible for maintaining the length of telomeres.

How does the telomerase help us stop gene erosion?

Telomeres serve as substrates for telomerase, the enzyme responsible for adding DNA to the ends of chromosomes, thus maintaining chromosome length [9, 16]. To compensate for the DNA erosion inherent in genetic stability, telomerase adds tandem array of simple-sequence repeats at the chromosome ends.

What happens if there is no telomerase?

Without telomeres, every cell division would mean that some amount of important genetic information would be clipped off and lost. The cell would, in some sense, get dumber and dumber as it divided and aged.

What is the role of telomerase in DNA replication and in the aging process?

Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein DNA polymerase complex that maintains telomere length. Telomerase activity can be restored to human cells by hTERT gene transduction or potentially via drug therapy; such extended-lifespan cells could be useful in forms of cell therapy to be developed for age-related diseases.

Is telomerase good or bad?

Too much telomerase can help confer immortality onto cancer cells and actually increase the likelihood of cancer, whereas too little telomerase can also increase cancer by depleting the healthy regenerative potential of the body.

What is the role of telomerase in DNA replication quizlet?

Telomerase binds to a DNA repeat sequence. Telomerase synthesizes a 6-nucleotide repeat sequence. Telomerase moves 6 nucleotides to the right and begins to make another repeat. Primase makes an RNA primer near the end of the telomere and DNA polymerase synthesizes a complementary strand in the 5′ to 3′ direction.

What is a telomerase quizlet?

Telomerase is an enzyme which. adds DNA sequences to the 3′ end of the telomere region of chromosomes. Telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes from. deterioration.

What are telomeres and what does the shortening of telomeres cause quizlet?

-Without telomerase: telomeres get progressively shorter and eventually lead to Go or death. >Not active: get shorter each division and reach a threshold and prevents cell from getting through another cell division. ->Depends on length on how many times can divide (lifespan) Telomeres (cancer)