Priority Research Paper Volume 1, Issue 7 pp 608—621

Figure 1. Up-regulation of gene expression with telomere shortening in human fibroblasts. mRNA levels of ISG15 and agrin were assayed by qantitative PCR in human fibroblasts with different telomere lengths. Results from at least three separate experiments are shown as means ± SEM. GAPDH was used as an internal normalization control. All values were then normalized to the level (=100%) of mRNA in young cells with long telomeres (PD18) (see Table 1). Results show increase of ISG15 and agrin expression with telomere shortening. Similar results for ISG15 were also obtained in IMR90 cells, NHK and HME epithelial cells (Supplementary Figure 1).