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Our research team, led by Dr. Fenech, focuses on investigating nutritional requirements for genome health maintenance and determining how genetic background influences nutritional requirements for preventing DNA damage. Damage to DNA is a critical underlying cause of developmental and degenerative disease. Our goal is to develop new approaches for modifying disease risk by determining which nutrients and foods are important for optimizing genome health. Dr. Fenech is renowned for developing the cytokinesis-block micronucleus (CBMN) assay, which is a quick and reliable technique for detecting abnormalities in chromosomes. The CBMN assay is now a standard technique used by major pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for determining the safety of pharmaceuticals, food ingredients, and radiation-emitting devices, and has been successfully used to identify dietary deficiencies and excesses associated with DNA damage in humans. The laboratory's research also focuses on dietary needs for stability and maintenance of critical regions of chromosomes, such as telomeres. The central aim of the laboratory is to determine which micronutrients are required for genome health maintenance in an individual (i.e., personalized nutrition) by developing minimally invasive diagnostics to measure dietary effects on DNA damage in easily accessible target tissues.
www.csiro.au/people/Michael.Fenech.html
The Technique
Telomere shortening is an important risk factor for cancer and accelerated aging. The gold standard and most commonly used method for measuring telomere length determines an average terminal restriction fragment (TRF) size. This Southern blot-based method is laborious and requires a large input of DNA and time. We have developed a simple and reproducible method to measure absolute telomere length. This method is based on Cawthon's quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) assay, which, in its original format, produces a relative measure of telomere length. Cawthon first described the use of qRT-PCR to measure telomere length in 2002. Since then there have been numerous reports of this method being used effectively. We have developed a modification to the Cawthon method, introducing an oligomer standard to generate absolute telomere length values rather than relative quantification, and we show that such a method might also be more reproducible than the relative method. The capability to generate absolute telomere length values using qRT-PCR technology should allow a more direct comparison of results between experiments within and among laboratories as well as provide a more practical high-throughput quantitative method as compared to the TRF assay.
See “A quantitative real-time PCR method for absolute telomere length” on page 807.
