Arthur J. Lustig is at the Department of Biochemistry in the Tulane University Health Sciences Center, 1430 Tulane Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana 70112, USA. alustig@tulane.edu
Catastrophic losses of telomeric sequences have recently been described during apoptosis, senescence and tumorigenesis in murine and human cells, in ataxia telangiectasia patients and in immortalized cells in which telomerase is inactive. A mechanism that underlies a single-step non-reciprocal telomere deletion called telomere rapid deletion in Saccharomyces cerevisiae might provide clues for future studies of catastrophic telomere loss in higher eukaryotes.