Composition and Regulatory Function of Terminal and Interstitial Telomeric Repeats

Title: Composition and Regulatory Function of Terminal and Interstitial Telomeric Repeats 

Speaker: Petra Schrumpfová

Affiliation: Masaryk University /CEITEC, Brno

Abstract:

Telomeres, the physical ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, are usually composed from tandemly arranged minisatellites  - in plants (TTTAGGG)n. Maintenance of terminally located telomeric repeats in most living eukaryotes requires a telomerase - a specific reverse transcriptase enzyme complex that adds telomeric repeats to the chromosome ends by the mechanism of reverse transcription. Telomerase consists of telomerase RNA (TR) component, which serves as the RNA template, a catalytic subunit (TERT) and many other associated proteins. The plant TR has only recently been characterised in our laboratory. In addition, we characterised some of the proteins that co-localize with TERT, telomeric sequences, and likely orchestrate telomere maintenance in plants.
Telomeric repeats are not found exclusively at the ends of chromosomes, but they are present also in multiple internal sites of chromosomes. Interestingly, short telomeric motifs may serve as regulatory elements in promoter sequences of several genes. Proteins associated with these telomeric motifs and their possible role in regulation of developmental processes will be discussed.