Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A polymer that consists of two, three, or four monomers.
Wiktionary
- n. chemistry A compound intermediate between a monomer and a polymer, normally having a specified number of units between about five and a hundred.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Chem.) A molecule composed of a small number of linked monomer units; a short polymer; -- compounds called
oligomers have less than one hundred monomer units and usually less than thirty. Oligomers of increasing length are called dimer, trimer, tetramer, pentamer, hexamer, heptamer, octamer, nonamer, decamer, etc. In colloquial laboratory jargon, they may also be referred to as nine-mer, ten-mer, eleven-mer, twelve-mer, etc., especially for oligomers of greater than eight units.
Etymologies
- oligo- + -mer (Wiktionary)
Examples
“I concluded that H3 and H4 must form a dimer, and I thought I might crystallize and solve the structure of this unique histone oligomer.”
“The rate of such changes and the mean length of such oligomers are dependent on the thermodynamic context (in the extreme case, an ice crystal may be considered as a single such oligomer, the crystal structure being dependent on the fixed, strong hydrogen bonds).”
“K172 indicated that the 392-amino acid-residue-long bacterial enzyme 6-aminohexanoic acid linear oligomer hydrolase involved in degradation of nylon oligomers is specified by an alternative open reading frame of the preexisted coding sequence that originally specified a 472-residue-long arginine-rich protein. sanjait”
"Intro to ID" by Gonzalez at U of Northern Iowa - The Panda's Thumb
“I started thinking about their problem and proposed an idea of my own which they ended up calling oligomer restriction.”
“The oligomer restriction method also relied on the fact that the target of interest contained a restriction site polymorphism, which kept it from being universally applicable to just any point mutation.”
“AVI's proprietary, intrinsically charge-neutral, phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomer PMO”
“This leads to a simple analytical form for the ligand-dependent free energy per ligand-binding subunit, and KI are the ligand dissociation constants for the active and inactive states of the oligomer, respectively.”
“An important assumption of the model is that the ligand dissociation constant for binding sites depends on the activity state of the oligomer.”
“Dr. Charles Glabe, an oligomer expert and a member of the Cure Alzheimer Fund research consortium, is also a co-author of the paper.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘oligomer’.
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medtech
terms found in documentation for implantable medical devices and IVD equip
distal, luer, stopcock, lumen, tortuosity, anneal, flouroscopy, radiopaque, distractor, toeing, tang, endoprosthesis and 173 more...
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sionnach's Words
contumely, fomite, holmgang, poltroon, eleemosynary, obsidian, nugatory, grindcore, felch, recrudescent, pyx, parenteral and 3271 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for oligomer.
fbharjo Or an oleogomer despite its marginal stickiness! Feb 1, 2012
dontcry Mmmm, my madeleines are a combination of musty wood, mothball-scented linens and strong coffee in the morning. I'm there - at the cottage. Feb 1, 2012
ruzuzu "The paradox of long-term memory has led neuroscientists to search for a so-called synaptic marker, a protein that would mark a particular synapse as a long-term memory and thus allow that synapse to maintain its strengthened connection for years at a time. As a result, Proust could remember his madeleine and I can recall that delicious Baskin Robbins ice cream cake, served at my 8th birthday party.
A new paper in Cell provides a fascinating glimpse into how this marking process might happen. According to research led by Kausik Si at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, it appears that one of the essential regulators of long-term memory – an ingredient that provides both persistence and specificity – is a protein called CPEB, or cytoplasmic polyadenylation element-binding protein.
In his latest paper, Si and colleagues have shown that this awkwardly named neural protein has a rather special quality, in that forms oligomers, or self-copying clusters. (In essence, the protein can cut and paste itself over and over again, like a biological version of command-V.) Interestingly, these oligomers are incredibly sturdy, proving resistant to all the usual lab solvents. While most proteins are easily unraveled, these repeating knots of CPEB can survive even the harshest environments. Furthermore, they also seem able to actively sustain themselves, serving as templates for the formation of new oligomers in the vicinity. It’s as if they’re infectious."
--"The Persistence Of Memory" by Jonah Lehrer (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/the-persistence-of-memory/) Feb 1, 2012