Patrick Neuhöfer

Jul 17, 2024 | nature.com | Patrick Neuhöfer |Julia A. Belk |Yung-Hsin Huang |Lu Chen |Howard Chang

AbstractTelomerase is intimately associated with stem cells and cancer, because it catalytically elongates telomeres—nucleoprotein caps that protect chromosome ends1. Overexpression of telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) enhances the proliferation of cells in a telomere-independent manner2,3,4,5,6,7,8, but so far, loss-of-function studies have provided no evidence that TERT has a direct role in stem cell function.