Unexpected Indication

Like a burly bouncer with a hidden talent for ballet, there’s more to telomeres than meets the eye. They are repeating sections of DNA that sit at the end of strands, protecting the inner regions by degrading a little each time a cell replicates. They eventually diminish sufficiently to cause cell damage as we age. It was recently discovered that, counter to previous beliefs, these lengths of DNA can code for two small proteins, VR and GL. Researchers synthesised these to study their impacts, and then found them more frequently in cancer cells (pictured, VR in green, human cancer cells in red) and in people with telomere-related diseases. A blood test for these proteins might be a route to early cancer diagnosis, and as the levels rise over time, the potent proteins might be an indicator of a person’s biological age (a more significant indicator of health than chronological age).

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Taghreed M. Al-Turki and Jack D. Griffith
• Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), September 2023