Figure 5–36 A demonstration that yeast cells control the length of their telomeres. In this experiment, the telomere at one end of a particular chromosome is artificially made either longer (left) or shorter (right) than average. After many cell divisions, the chromosome recovers, showing an average telomere length and a length distribution that is typical of the other chromosomes in the yeast cell. A similar feedback mechanism for controlling telomere length has been proposed for the germ-line cells of animals.
The idea that telomere length acts as a “measuring stick” to count cell divisions and thereby regulate the lifetime of the cell lineage has been tested in several ways. For certain types of human cells grown in tissue culture, the experimental results support such a theory. Human fibroblasts normally proliferate for about 60 cell divisions in culture before undergoing replicative cell senescence. Like most other somatic cells in humans, fibroblasts produce only low levels of telomerase, and their telomeres gradually shorten each time they divide. When telomerase is provided to the fibroblasts by inserting an active telomerase gene, telomere length is maintained and many of the cells now continue to proliferate indefinitely.
It has been proposed that this type of control on cell proliferation may contribute to the aging of animals like ourselves. These ideas have been tested by producing transgenic mice that lack telomerase entirely. The telomeres in mouse chromosomes are about five times longer than human telomeres, and the mice must therefore be bred through three or more generations before their telomeres have shrunk to the normal human length. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the first generations of mice develop normally. However, the mice in later generations develop progressively more defects in some of their highly proliferative tissues. In addition, these mice show signs of premature aging and have a pronounced tendency to develop tumors. In these and other respects these mice resemble humans with the genetic disease dyskeratosis congenita. Individuals afflicted with this disease carry one functional and one nonfunctional copy of the telomerase RNA gene; they have prematurely shortened telomeres and typically die of progressive bone marrow failure. They also develop lung scarring and liver cirrhosis and show abnormalities in various epidermal structures including skin, hair follicles, and nails.
The above observations demonstrate that controlling cell proliferation by telomere shortening poses a risk to an organism, because not all of the cells that begin losing the ends of their chromosomes will stop dividing. Some apparently become genetically unstable, but continue to divide, giving rise to variant cells that can lead to cancer. Clearly, the use of telomere shortening as a regulating mechanism is not foolproof and, like many mechanisms in the cell, seems to strike a balance between benefit and risk.
The proteins that initiate DNA replication bind to DNA sequences at a replication origin to catalyze the formation of a replication bubble with two outward-moving replication forks. The process begins when an initiator protein–DNA complex is formed that subsequently loads a DNA helicase onto the DNA template. Other proteins are then added to form the multienzyme “replication machine” that catalyzes DNA synthesis at each replication fork.
In bacteria and some simple eukaryotes, replication origins are specified by specific DNA sequences that are only several hundred nucleotide pairs long. In other eukaryotes, such as humans, the sequences needed to specify an origin of DNA replication seem to be less well defined, and the origin can span several thousand nucleotide pairs.