PLoS ONE (Jan 2014)

A genome-wide association study identifies a locus on TERT for mean telomere length in Han Chinese.

  • Yun Liu,
  • Lan Cao,
  • Zhiqiang Li,
  • Daizhan Zhou,
  • Wanqing Liu,
  • Qin Shen,
  • Yanting Wu,
  • Dan Zhang,
  • Xun Hu,
  • Ting Wang,
  • Junyi Ye,
  • Xiaoling Weng,
  • Hong Zhang,
  • Di Zhang,
  • Zhou Zhang,
  • Fatao Liu,
  • Lin He,
  • Yongyong Shi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085043
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 1
p. e85043

Abstract

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Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is a predictor of aging and a number of age-related diseases. We performed genome-wide association studies of mean LTL in 2632 individuals,with a two-stage replication in 3917 individuals from Chinese populations. To further validate our findings, we get the results of 696 samples from a cohort of European ancestry. We identified two loci associated with LTL that map in telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT; rs2736100, P = 1.93×10(-5)) on chromosome 5p15.33 and near keratin 80 (KRT80; rs17653722, P = 6.96×10(-6)) on 12q13.13. In Chinese population each C allele of rs2736100 and T allele of rs17653722 was associated with a longer mean telomere length of 0.026 and 0.059 T/S, respectively, equivalent to about 3 and 7 years of average age-related telomere attrition. Our findings provide new insights into telomere regulatory mechanism and even pathogenesis of age-related diseases.