Fluorescence Spectroscopic Detection and Measurement of Single Telomere Molecules

Telomeres are the end-caps of chromosomes that serve to protect the integrity of the genome and which shorten during normal cell division. They are implicated in the development of various aging-associated diseases including cancer and telomere length has the potential to serve as a useful biomarker in the field of aging and cancer. However existing methods of telomere measurement are either too laborious unable to provide absolute measurement of individual telomere lengths or limited to certain chromosomes or cell types. We developed a method that uses a confocal spectroscopic system coupled to a microfluidic device to detect nanoparticles and single molecules. Furthermore an model has been developed to distinguish between true single molecule detection events and spurious peaks arising from noise. Combining these two approaches yields a flow cytometry-like method for characterizing single DNA molecules that we have used to profile telomere length distributions from genomic DNA extracted from cells.