Measurement of the average length of telomeres

Capital Bioscences, Inc. employs a simple and reproducible method to measure absolute telomere length using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction protocol supplied with oligomer standards. The primers are designed to generate a short, fixed-length product. In contrast to the described SYBR green-based methods, we can use our proprietary primers providing attachment of only one fluorescent group to each amplicon produced in the assay both for amplification of the telomeric repeats and for amplification of a reference single-copy gene sequences. This produces extended linear ranges for the calibration curves used in this method and a better estimation of the length for short telomeres.