Unlimited proliferation in immortalized cells is believed to be highly dependent on the activity of telomerase, a ribonucleoprotein that synthesizes telomeric repeats onto chromosome ends. Using a polymerase chain reaction-based telomeric repeat amplification protocol (TRAP) assay, we analysed telomerase activity in 99 benign and 45 malignant brain tumours. The TRAP assay results were quantitated by normalizing the telomerase activity of each specimen to that of human glioma cell line T98G to obtain the relative telomerase activity. Telomerase activity was also assessed visually from the autoradiograms as being positive or negative. One hundred and sixteen tumours with negative telomerase activity had null relative telomerase activity, whereas 28 tumours with positive telomerase activity had relative telomerase activities of 12-84.3% (mean 0% vs 36.1 +/- 19.3%, P < 0.0001). Thus, quantification of telomerase activity confirmed the results of the visual evaluation of telomerase activity on autoradiograms. Based on the assessment, malignant brain tumours had a higher positive rate of telomerase activity than benign tumours (57.8% vs 2.0%, P < 0.001). These data indicate that positive telomerase activity is strongly associated with malignant brain tumours and is rather rare in benign tumours, such as neurinomas or meningiomas.
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