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Deciphering the complexity of events at telomeres has enhanced understanding of how telomeres function to maintain genome integrity and how their dysfunction gives rise to human disease.
Telomerase is a nucleoprotein complex of a reverse transcriptase and an RNA that binds complementary telomeric-repeat DNA sequences and directs their extension. In this Commentary, the authors propose how hairpin structures formed by telomeric DNA repeats promote addition of telomerase repeats and why telomere sequences are evolutionarily conserved despite the problems that they pose to DNA replication.
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