Comparison between southern blots and qPCR analysis of leukocyte telomere length in the health ABC study.
Only a few studies, primarily limited to small samples, have examined the relationship between leukocyte telomere length (LTL) data generated by Southern blots, expressed in kilobases, versus quantitative PCR data, expressed in the telomere product/a single gene product (T/S). In the present study, we compared LTL data generated by the two methods in 681 elderly participants (50% African Americans, 50% of European origin, 49.2% women, mean age 73.7±2.9 years) in the Health Aging and Body Composition Study. The correlation between the data generated by the two methods was modest (R (2) = .27). Both methods captured the age effect on LTL and the longer LTL in women than in men. However, only the Southern blot method showed a significantly longer LTL in African Americans than in European decent individuals, which might be attributed to the larger measurement error of the quantitative PCR-based method than the Southern blots.
Department of Biology and Genetics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104. celbers@mail.med.upenn.edu.
Clara C
CC
Elbers
Melissa E
ME
Garcia
Masayuki
M
Kimura
Steven R
SR
Cummings
Mike A
MA
Nalls
Anne B
AB
Newman
Vicki
V
Park
Jason L
JL
Sanders
Gregory J
GJ
Tranah
Sarah A
SA
Tishkoff
Tamara B
TB
Harris
Abraham
A
Aviv
D001741:Black or African American; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging; D015139:Blotting, Southern; D001823:Body Composition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007962:Leukocytes / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D060888:Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction; D016615:Telomere / Q000502:physiology*; D044465:White People
Leukocyte telomere length; Quantitative PCR; Southern blots.