Chronic low-dose pro-oxidant treatment stimulates transcriptional activity of telomeric retroelements and increases telomere length in Drosophila.

It has been proposed that oxidative stress, elicited by high levels of reactive oxygen species, accelerates telomere shortening by erosion of telomeric DNA repeats. While most eukaryotes counteract telomere shortening by telomerase-driven addition of these repeats, telomeric loss in Drosophila is compensated by retrotransposition of the telomeric retroelements HeT-A, TART and TAHRE to chromosome ends. In this study we tested the effect of chronic exposure of flies to non-/sub-lethal doses of paraquat, which is a redox cycling compound widely used to induce oxidative stress in various experimental paradigms including telomere length analyses.