Telomere length declines with mean blood lead concentration in an urban passerine

In this study, we examined the effects of Pb on telomere dynamics of free-living house sparrows, in the mining city of Broken Hill, Australia. We found that sparrows in areas with a higher mean blood lead content have shorter telomeres, but the effect was weak and not observed when using soil lead, or juvenile data only. There was no telomere shortening in recaptured birds, and the telomere rate of change was not prodicted by lead.List of data files:BirdData.csv: Sparrow capture records.JRaw.csv: Raw qPCR results of telomere length measurements in juvenile samples.JuvenileTL.csv: Juvenile telomere length dataset compiled from JRaw.csv and BirdData.csv.MeanBloodPb.csv: Blood lead measurement for each capture site.RetrapTL.csv: Recapture telomere length dataset compiled from RRaw.csv and BirdData.csv.RRaw.csv: Raw qPCR results of telomere length measurements in recapture samples.TLxLead.R: R script for data analysis.