 These characteristics allowed Blackburn and colleagues to conduct further research on the protozoan.Using the telomeric repeated end of "Tetrahymena", Blackburn and colleague Jack Szostak showed the unstable replicating plasmids of yeast were protected from degradation, proving that these sequences contained characteristics of telomeres.This research also proved the telomeric repeats of "Tetrahymena" were conserved evolutionarily between the species.