¶¶Òõ´«Ã½ÔÚÏß

Skip to main content

Replicative senescence induction in single cells is not predicted by telomere length, dysfunction, or oxidation (iScience 2026)

Victor Passanisis 2026 Graphical abstract

The accumulation of senescent cells during aging contributes to age-associated diseases. Current models posit that replicative senescence is driven by telomere dysfunction, including telomere shortening, telomere-associated DNA damage response (DDR), and telomere oxidation. Here, we first show that aging primary human fibroblasts gradually increase the time spent in a CDK2-low non-cycling state and increase senescence biomarker expression. We then evaluate telomere features as single-cell senescence biomarkers in a workflow linking high-throughput, long-term time-lapse imaging with confocal imaging to map cell-cycle dynamics to telomere features in the same cell. Our results show that telomere length and DDR do not reliably distinguish cycling from non-cycling cells at any age, and that telomere oxidation is not associated with cell-cycle withdrawal. Instead, lysosomal content, cell size, genomic architecture, and p21 more reliably mark senescence induction, depicting replicative senescence as a complex state transition with currently measurable telomere features being weakly correlated with senescence.