Conclusion
Telomeres are a potential biomarker for quantifying species’ response to
environmental stress. Therefore, it is critical to evaluate innovative
approaches for estimating telomere length in both model and non-model
organisms. In this study, we demonstrated that estimating telomere
length from WGS is a feasible approach for Populus trees,
offering a new opportunity to estimate telomere length for plants.
Although there are potential caveats that need to be addressed in future
studies, our results show that telomere length estimated using
short-read whole genome sequence data yield comparable results to
traditional qPCR. Importantly, we suggest that telomere length estimates
derived from WGS is more accurate than those obtained from qPCR, by
providing the absolute telomere length. We specifically recommend
Computel to estimate telomere length using WGS as it incorporates genome
coverage into telomere estimations and provides species-specific
parameterization needed to correlate with qPCR telomere estimates. We
suggest that telomere length estimates from WGS are sensitive to genome
coverage, and this may be a major consideration to study sequence
design. The results of this study open new avenues for estimating
telomere length across diverse organisms and will help accelerate
telomere ecological research in plants.
Acknowledgments
We thank Kyle Peer, Clay Sawyers, and Deborah Bird (Virginia Tech
Reynold’s Homestead Forestry Research Station) for assistance with plant
propagation. We also thank to Jeffrey D Kittilson for helping with the
qPCR essays. We also would like to thank to the NSF (NSF-PGR-1856450),
USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch Appropriations
(Project #PEN04809 and Accession #7003639), Schatz Center for Tree
Molecular Genetics, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Department of
Ecosystem Science and Management, and Pennsylvania State University’s
Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Ecology for the funding support.