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Association Between Telomere Length and Falciparum Malaria Endemicity in Sub-Saharan Africans

The goal of this study was to identify the genetic and environmental drivers of telomere length variation in an ethnically diverse African cohort. It comprises 1,818 participants from Cameroon, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Botswana. For each participant, leukocyte telomere length was measured using the Southern blotting of the terminal restriction fragment methodology. 1,758 of the individuals with phenotype data also had genetic data, and these individuals were subjected to a genome-wide association study which accounted for age, sex, and genetic relatedness. Individuals were genotyped on one of two genotyping arrays (Illumina Infinium Omni5 array or Illumina H3Africa consortium array). Genetic datasets were merged, and missing genotypes were imputed for a final genetic dataset of 11,001,107 genetic variants. Correlations between telomere length and a variety of environmental factors, including malaria endemicity, were also examined in this study.