Telomeres, the caps of chromosomes, shorten with age. Using qPCR, Nilhesh Samani, Veryan Codd and colleagues measured leukocyte telomere length in close to half a million individuals from the UK Biobank, confirming several previous associations. This dataset offers many new opportunities to explore associations between leukocyte telomere length and other traits relevant to human aging and health.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Strategic Research Program in Epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, the King Gustaf V and Queen Victoria’s Foundation of Freemasons, the Start-up Grant of Sun Yat-Sen University, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 72061137006) and NIH U24 AG066528-03 (principal investigator: S. Drury).
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Hägg, S., Zhan, Y. Telomere research entering the big data era. Nat Aging 2, 102–104 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-022-00175-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-022-00175-2