Anhui Province Key Laboratory for Conservation and Exploitation of Biological Resource, College of Life Sciences, Anhui Normal University Wuhu 241000, PR China.
A fundamental observation of replicative senescence is the telomere shortening in many species. The objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the length of the telomeric DNA and the age of the Chinese alligator, as well as to offer a molecular approach to determine the age of this species. To that end, the Southern Blot method was used in this paper to analyze the telometric DNA of Chinese alligators from three age groups. The results showed that telomere lengths of erythrocytes have a significant variance among individuals (P<0.0001). In addition, the results demonstrated that, for Chinese alligators, telomere lengths greatly decrease with the increasing age.
Chinese alligator, telomere, lifespan, southern blot
