Priority Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 16 pp 15906—15917
Dynamics of telomeric repeat-containing RNA expression in early embryonic cleavage stages with regards to maternal age
- 1 Institute of Animal Reproduction and Food Research of Polish Academy of Sciences, Olsztyn, Poland
- 2 Institute for Veterinary Medicine, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland
- 3 Telomeres and Telomerase Group, Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), Madrid, Spain
Received: June 17, 2020 Accepted: July 21, 2020 Published: August 29, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103922How to Cite
Copyright © 2020 Kordowitzki et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.
Abstract
Telomeres are transcribed into long non-coding RNAs known as Telomeric Repeat-Containing RNA (TERRA). They have been shown to be essential regulators of telomeres and to act as epigenomic modulators at extra-telomeric sites. However the role of TERRA during early embryonic development has never been investigated. Here, we show that TERRA is expressed in murine and bovine early development following a wave pattern. It starts at 4-cell stage, reaching a maximum at the 16-cell followed by a decline at the morula and blastocyst stages. Moreover, TERRA expression is not affected by increasing oocyte donor age whereas telomere length does. This indicates that TERRA expression is independent of the telomere length in early development. Our findings anticipate an essential role of TERRA in early stages of development and this might be useful in the future for a better understanding of age related female infertility.