1. Introduction
Telomerase is an RNA–protein complex that synthesizes and maintains
telomere length to counter the end replication problem by adding
repeated oligomer sequence to the 3′ termini of chromosomal DNA
(Greider and Blackburn, 1987). The human telomerase reverse transcriptase
(hTERT) is the catalytically active component of the telomerase
complex (Nakamura et al., 1997). hTERT catalyzes the telomere
elongation that leads to increased genomic stability and enhanced
DNA-repair (Sharma et al., 2003).