Dr. Russell asked me to keep a weather eye peeled for stuff on telomeres and telomerase and I'll use this page to collect what I find. It makes a good example for Bio182, because it's topical and current and sprawls across the landscape of kinds of literature.
So where to begin? I want a quick read of just how specialized the subject is (not necessarily the specialized literature itself, but some sense of who's doing what with the subject), and for that the web is an appropriate place to begin --though I certainly won't limit myself to what I find.
AUTHOR Kipling, David. TITLE The telomere / David Kipling. PUBLISHER Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1995. DESCRIPT x, 208 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. BIBLIOG. Includes bibliographical references and index. CONTENTS Introduction -- The cytology of the telomere -- Telomere structure -- Telomerase -- Telomere proteins -- Genome rearrangements and telomeres -- Human telomere loss, ageing, and cancer -- Chromatin structure and position effects -- Structure and maintenance of Drosophila telomeres -- Telomeres and mammalian genome analysis. SUBJECT Telomere. Science Library QH600.3 .K57 1995
A search of Science turns up 22 articles in the last couple of years, some brand new.
A search of PNAS finds 13.
And a search of Science News turned up several references, including this summary:
Enzyme rare in adults may signal cancers
Telomerase, an enzyme rarely seen in the healthy human body, may be a warning sign of cancer.
References:
Kinoshita, H., et al. 1997. Detection of telomerase activity in exfoliated cells in urine from patients with bladder cancer. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 89(May 21):724.
Kyo, S., et al. 1997. Application of telomerase assay for the screening of cervical lesions. Cancer Research 57(May 15):1863.
Muller, M. 1997. Telomerase in bladder cancer, bladder washings and in urine. Annual meeting of the American Urological Association. New Orleans.
Further Readings:Blackburn, E. 1991. Structure and function of telomeres. Nature 350:569.
Harley, C. 1991. Telomere loss: Mitotic clock or genetic time bomb? Mutation Research 256:271.
Kim, N., et al. 1994. Specific association of human telomerase activity with immortal cells and cancer. Science 266:2011.
Park, T., et al. 1996. Association between human papillomavirus type and clonal status of cervical squamous intraepithelial lesions. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 88:355.
Rhyu, M. 1995. Telomeres, telomerase and immortality. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 87(June 21):884.
Shay, J. 1995. Aging and cancer: Are telomeres and telomerase the connection? Molecular Medicine Today 1:378.
Travis, J. 1995. End games. Science News 148(Nov. 25):362.
Seeing that there are plenty of articles in this general area I need to get some sense of the amount, and so I consult some specialized databases:
A search of Cambridge Scientific Abstracts for 'telomerase' found 225 references (1992-1998).
UnCover found 'telomerase' in the titles of 311 articles.
It's not surprising that PubMed finds a lot: 564 items for 'telomerase'
But plunging directly in to that specialist literature doesn't make sense until I have some background, and so I consult BioDigest (a good place to start a search) and the search for 'telomerase' produces 23 items, each with a summary. Reading through some of these will provide a good basis for narrowing searches in the more specialized databases.
In short, a couple of hours of looking has produced a lot of leads and a lot of material to examine in more detail.