“…Increasing studies reported that human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) was a telomerase catalytic subunit and served as the major limiting agent for telomerase activity [3,4,38]. Telomerase activity was closely associated with the expression of hTERT mRNA [3,4,8,22], therefore hTERT mRNA expression was quantified by real-time fluorescent quantitative PCR to reflect telomerase activity (Fig.…”