Human chromosome 5 carries a putative telomerase repressor gene

Abstract

Telomerase, the ribonucleoprotein enzyme that maintains the telomere, is active in human germ and stem cells and in a majority of tumor tissues and immortalized cell lines. In contrast, telomerase activity is not detected in most somatic cells, suggesting that normal human cells contain a regulatory factor(s) to repress this activity. To identify which human chromosomes carry a gene or genes that function as telomerase repressors, we investigated telomerase activity in hybrids of the B16-F10 cell line, which contain individual human chromosomes transferred previously by microcell fusion and therefore represent a hybrid panel for the entire genome except for the Y chromosome. Microcell hybrids with an introduced normal human chromosome 5 showed inhibition of telomerase activity, but clones at a late passage exhibited reactivation of telomerase activity. Reactivation of telomerase activity was accompanied by deletion and/or rearrangement of the transferred human chromosome 5. The introduction of other human chromosomes did not significantly affect the telomerase activity of B16-F10 cells. The effect of suppression of telomerase activity in microcell hybrids containing chromosome 5 was accompanied by a reduction in the level of mTERT mRNA, which encodes a component of the telomerase complex. The putative telomerase repressor gene was mapped to human chromosome bands 5p11–p13 by a combination of functional analysis using transfer of subchromosomal transferable fragments of chromosome 5 into B16-F10 cells and deletion mapping of revertant clones with reactivated telomerase activity. Thus, these results suggest that loss of a gene(s) on this chromosome was responsible for telomerase reactivation, indicating that human chromosome 5 contains a gene or genes that can regulate the expression of mTERT in B16-F10 cells.