Telomeres, the end of chromosomes, play a pivotal role in human disease. Telomere length is maintained as defined distribution of lengths in a population of cells. Short telomere lengths cause age-related degenerative disease, while long telomeres predispose people to cancer. Understanding the mechanisms that regulate telomere length is critical to envision approaches to disease treatments. However, the methods used to determine telomere length over the last 40 years are imprecise and often difficult to reproduce.UCSC Researchers developed a method to employ the Nanopore long read DNA sequencing, previously developed at UCSC, to determine telomere length in both yeast and human cells. Using this new innovative technology, we found that each chromosome end has a unique telomere length distribution that is regulated independently from other chromosome ends. This finding was unexpected and calls into question the models for length regulation that have predominated for the past 30 years. Our new nanopore telomere length measurement will allow us to probe new models of length regulation at unprecedented resolution.