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.