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. 2018 Mar 12;25:22. doi: 10.1186/s12929-018-0422-8

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© The Author(s). 2018

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Fig. 1 — Telomere length dynamics in different cells over time. Telomeres shorten over time. Germ cells and embryonic stem cells have long telomeres that are maintained by telomerase activity. Stem cells have shorter telomeres and somatic cells even shorter. After multiple cell divisions these cells achieve a senescence state (M1). At M2 stage cells enter crisis due to their short telomeres that lead to chromosomal and genomic instability resulting in apoptosis. Cancer cells escape from crisis through telomerase activation, reacquire longer telomeres and unlimited self-renewal capacity