A Comprehensive Catalog of Telomere Content Variation Across Human Populations

Abstract

Quantifying telomere content across global human populations is critical to understanding the evolutionary biology of senescence and has implications for the field of biogerontology. Here, we analyzed 26 global human populations from Phase 3 of the 1000 Genomes Project and observed that differences in telomere content vary significantly across different human populations. Most notably, African-ancestry populations in the Americas: ACB (African Caribbean in Barbados) and ASW ((African Ancestry in Southwest USA) showed significantly different telomere content compared to both continental African populations and populations from other ancestries (p < 10-5) However, we did not observe significant differences (p > 0.05) in telomere content between sexes across and within different populations. We also report that out of the five superpopulations (separated by continental ancestry), humans of American ancestry show significant difference in telomere content with all other superpopulations (p < 0.001 for all comparisons), whereas humans of East Asian and South Asian ancestry show no significant differences with other superpopulations (p > 0.05). Our analysis suggests that the extent of telomere content variation is likely influenced by complex interactions between genomic and environmental factors. The pipeline to catalog telomere content variation is publicly available via: https://github.com/paribytes/TeloTales.