Project

Effect of Hypoxic Stress on Rate of Telomere Loss in Chicken Embryos

Telomeres are the extension of repeated non-coding sequences towards the end of the chromosome. They serve as a protective cap to protect the coding sequences from getting exposed and damaged. A few telomeric repeats are lost after each cell cycle due to end- replication problem which leads to the reduction in telomeric length. Enzyme telomerase restores the lost repeats and preserves telomere length in chromosomes. However, the enzyme activity decreases with biological age leading to telomere attrition, which reaches a critical point where the cell stops dividing causing apoptosis. Progressive reduction in telomere length has been associated with life span and stress in mammals and birds. The goal of this study was to develop a technique to evaluate stress in captive birds by establishing a positive correlation between telomere rate of loss and stress. To achieve this fertilized chicken eggs were incubated in hypoxic and normoxic conditions over four trials. Wet/ dry hearts and bodies of the embryos were weighed at the end of the trial to quantify stress. Blood was sampled at three time-points and qPCR assay was performed to determine the relative telomere length. The result of study indicates that hypoxia combined with blood draw procedures imposed immense stress and decreased the viability in embryos especially in hypoxic embryos therefore qPCR assay was only performed on 2 hypoxic samples. qPCR assay demonstrated that as the embryos advance further into incubation the rate of loss increases. However due to insufficient data rate of loss couldn’t be related to stress.

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