Katarzyna Heller-Uszynska

PubMed2004

Microarray TRAP--a high-throughput assay to quantitate telomerase activity.

Telomeric repeat amplification protocol (TRAP)--a sensitive, PCR-based assay to detect telomerase activity was quintessential to the evaluation of telomerase role in telomere maintenance, cell proliferation, tumour development, and cell immortalization. The assay, however, suffers from many limitations. The most significant are: lack of telomerase activity quantification, changes of the enzyme activity product size and/or ratio, and complex post-amplification procedures which limit the assay throughput. Here we report the development of the microarray TRAP (MTRAP) assay which combines advantages of microarray technology with a modified TRAP assay. The MTRAP was designed and optimized on rice cell suspension telomerase extract to enable telomerase specific, reliable, and linear quantification in high throughput mode, with sensitivity comparable to those of radioisotope-based TRAP assays. The MTRAP has a built-in system guaranteeing the amplification of telomerase activity products unchanged in length and/or ratio and built-in control for false negatives. Thus, our MTRAP assay provides new reliable tool for experiments requiring massive quantitation of telomerase activity.

Enzyme Activation↗

PubMed2002

Cloning and characterization of rice (Oryza sativa L) telomerase reverse transcriptase, which reveals complex splicing patterns.

Plant chromosomes terminate in telomeres as in other eukaryotes. Telomeres are vital to genome stability and their malfunctioning is lethal. One of the core components of the telomere complex is telomerase. The enzyme activity depends on RNA (TER) and reverse transcriptase (TERT) subunits. We describe here the isolation, sequencing and characterization of the telomerase reverse transcriptase catalytic subunit from the monocot plant Oryza sativa L. (OsTERT). A single copy of this gene is present in the rice genome. The protein predicted from the OsTERT sequence has all the signature motifs of the TERT family members. Our data indicate that rice telomerase activity is developmentally regulated and is high in in vitro tissue and cell culture. However, steady-state transcript levels of the TERT gene do not seem to correlate with enzyme activity. Northern and RT-PCR analyses of the OsTERT gene transcript profile show multiple differentially spliced transcripts in both telomerase-positive and telomerase-negative tissues. Based on quantitative analysis of these transcripts, we speculate that the overall balance between the quantities of particular alternatively spliced transcripts may determine whether the TERT protein(s) is active or not. The diversity of splicing variants detected suggests that, as recently discovered for mammalian TERT proteins, rice TERT protein variants may perform functions other than telomere maintenance.

Alternative Splicing↗