Commentary: The reliability of telomere length measurements

Simon Verhulst,Troels Steenstrup,Jeremy D Kark,Athanase Benetos,Pam R Factor-Litvak,Abraham Aviv,Ezra Susser,Mirre Jp Simons

doi:10.1093/ije/dyv166

Abstract

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Commentary: The reliability of telomere length measurements

Highlights

coefficient of variation (CV) as a measure of reliability A characteristic of the CV is its dependence on the mean, and the implicit assumption when using the CV is heteroscedasticity, i.e. that the variance is proportional to the mean. We examined whether this assumption holds in the results presented by Martin-Ruiz et al (MR)
Only two of the 12 samples were from human leukocytes, the standard cell type used in epidemiological studies, and the inter-assay reliability of leukocyte TL (LTL) was not measured
The qPCR does have the advantage over Southern blots (SBs) and other methods in that it costs less and requires fewer resources, but at the expense of measurement reliability

Summary

University of Groningen

Commentary Verhulst, Simon; Susser, Ezra; Factor-Litvak, Pam R.; Simons, Mirre J. Simon Verhulst,[1] Ezra Susser,[2] Pam R Factor-Litvak,[3] Mirre JP Simons,[4] Athanase Benetos,[5] Troels Steenstrup,[6] Jeremy D Kark[7] and Abraham Aviv8*. For the two leukocyte samples, the inter-laboratory CVs were 6.2% and 6.5% for the SB/STELA laboratories vs 22.2% and 22.2% for the qPCR laboratories (samples K and L, Table 2, in erratum MR)[6] These results, albeit from a tiny sample size, are consistent with higher measurement error of the qPCR over SB/STELA based-methods. This is not specific for the leukocyte samples; overall the inter-laboratory CVs were substantially higher when using qPCR (P 1⁄4 0.001 according to MR). It is important to demonstrate in impartial studies that DNA integrity does not affect the T/S ratio results

Conclusions

Findings

Is Southern blotting necessary to measure