Telomeres are highly repetitive regions capping the chromosomes and composed of multiple units of hexa-nucleotides, TTAGGG, making their quantification difficult. Most of the methods developed to estimate telomeres are extensively cumbersome or expensive. The quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) based assay is relatively easy and cheaper method that applies SyBr Green dye chemistry to measure telomere length. SyBr Green dye fluoresces after intercalation into the double stranded DNA (dsDNA), thus detection of unspecific products has been a limitation as it may affect quantitation of telomeres. To overcome this limitation of SyBr Green dye, we developed a dual labeled fluorescence probe based quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) to measure the telomere length. This highly efficient, yet cost effective and easy method, utilizes a probe that targets primarily the telomeric DNA and this increases accuracy of an existing qPCR method.

端粒是覆盖染色体的高度重复区域，由六单元的多个单元组成-核苷酸TTAGGG，使其难以定量。估计端粒的大多数方法繁琐或昂贵。基于定量聚合酶链反应（qPCR）的测定是相对简单且便宜的方法，该方法将SyBr Green染料化学应用于端粒长度的测量。SyBr Green染料插入双链DNA（dsDNA）后发出荧光，因此非特异性产物的检测一直受到限制，因为它可能影响端粒的定量。为了克服SyBr Green染料的这一局限性，我们开发了一种基于双标记荧光探针的定量聚合酶链反应（qPCR）以测量端粒长度。这种高效但又经济高效且简便的方法利用了主要靶向端粒DNA的探针，从而提高了现有qPCR方法的准确性。