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Telomere::::
How do we deal with age and agelessness, the triumph of the human
spirit while the inevitable collapse of body occurs through time? “Telomere”
is a multimedia ballet which uses the process of cell division as a metaphor
for the life process of a prima ballerina.
In an alchemy of art and science the many aspects of aging are
experienced physically, socially, psychologically, spiritually and
emotionally. Telomeres, the sections of DNA occurring at the extreme ends of each chromosome eukaryotic cells. Telomeres consist of highly repetitive sequences of DNA that do not code for proteins, but function as caps to keep chromosomes from fusing together. These repetitive sequences protect the ends of the chromosome from damage, and prevent the chromosomes from fusing into rings, or binding haphazardly to other DNA in the cell nucleus. The length of the telomere influences the stability of genetic information just interior of the telomere, since the nucleotide sequences at the ends of a chromosome are not copied by DNA polymerase. Successive copying can thus shorten telomeres, sometimes to the point that functional genes near the telomeres are lost, and this may play a role in cellular senescence. The shortening of telomeres during each round of cell division may be part of the natural aging of cells, a clock that possibly determines the longevity of a cell lineage.
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