ArticleAmerican journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council
Improving qPCR telomere length assays: Controlling for well position effects increases statistical power.
Article in American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Association between Childhood Exposure to Family Violence and Telomere Length: A Meta-Analysis.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Pooled it
- Reproductive Drivers of Temporal Telomere Dynamics in Female Tree Swallows.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Environmental and Genetic Determinants of Early-Life Telomere Length in Tree Swallows.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Mothers Matter Most: Maternal, but Not Paternal, Age and Inbreeding Affect Nestling Telomere Length in a Wild Passerine.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Heritability and age-dependent changes in genetic variation of telomere length in a wild house sparrow population.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- The influence of perceived stress and motivation on telomere length among NCAA swimmers.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2024Article
- Article
- Quantitative performance assessment of Ultivue multiplex panels in formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded human and murine tumor specimens.Scientific reports · 2024Article
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- Demographic and health predictors of telomere length during adolescence.Developmental psychobiology · 2022Article
- Article
- Do the telomere ends justify the physical means?Journal of the American Geriatrics Society · 2021Article
- Urinary arsenic and relative telomere length in 5-7 year old children in Bangladesh.Environment international · 2021Article
- Idiopathic early ovarian aging: is there a relation with premenopausal accelerated biological aging in young women with diminished response to ART?Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics · 2021Article
- A novel multiplex qPCR method for assessing the comparative lengths of telomeres.Journal of clinical laboratory analysis · 2021Article
- Male Voiding Behavior: Insight from 19,824 At-Home Uroflow Profiles.The Journal of urology · 2021Article
- Leukocyte Telomere Length Is Not Reduced in Children and Adults with Cystic Fibrosis but Associates with Clinical Characteristics-A Cross-Sectional Study.Journal of clinical medicine · 2021Article
- Predictors of maternal-origin microchimerism in young women in the Philippines.American journal of physical anthropology · 2021Article
- Effect of CHRFAM7A Δ2bp gene variant on secondary inflammation after spinal cord injury.PloS one · 2021Article
- Method comparison studies of telomere length measurement using qPCR approaches: A critical appraisal of the literature.PloS one · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesTelomere length (TL) is commonly measured using quantitative PCR (qPCR). Although, easier than the southern blot of terminal restriction fragments (TRF) TL measurement method, one drawback of qPCR is that it introduces greater measurement error and thus reduces the statistical power of analyses. To address a potential source of measurement error, we consider the effect of well position on qPCR TL measurements.
methodsqPCR TL data from 3,638 people run on a Bio-Rad iCycler iQ are reanalyzed here. To evaluate measurement validity, correspondence with TRF, age, and between mother and offspring are examined.
resultsFirst, we present evidence for systematic variation in qPCR TL measurements in relation to thermocycler well position. Controlling for these well-position effects consistently improves measurement validity and yields estimated improvements in statistical power equivalent to increasing sample sizes by 16%. We additionally evaluated the linearity of the relationships between telomere and single copy gene control amplicons and between qPCR and TRF measures. We find that, unlike some previous reports, our data exhibit linear relationships. We introduce the standard error in percent, a superior method for quantifying measurement error as compared to the commonly used coefficient of variation. Using this measure, we find that excluding samples with high measurement error does not improve measurement validity in our study.
conclusionsFuture studies using block-based thermocyclers should consider well position effects. Since additional information can be gleaned from well position corrections, rerunning analyses of previous results with well position correction could serve as an independent test of the validity of these results.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.