Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A polymer consisting of at least 2 and as many as 100 monomers.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (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 calleddimer ,trimer ,tetramer ,pentamer ,hexamer ,heptamer ,octamer ,nonamer ,decamer , etc. In colloquial laboratory jargon, they may also be referred to asnine-mer ,ten-mer ,eleven-mer ,twelve-mer , etc., especially for oligomers of greater than eight units.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun chemistry A
compound intermediate between amonomer and apolymer , normally having a specified number of units between about five and a hundred.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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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.
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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).
Natural Kinds Bird, Alexander 2008
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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 2005
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I started thinking about their problem and proposed an idea of my own which they ended up calling oligomer restriction.
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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.
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AVI's proprietary, intrinsically charge-neutral, phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomer PMO
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AVI-7100 employs the Company's patented PMOplus™ technology that selectively introduces positive charges to a phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomer PMO backbone to improve selective interaction between the drug and its target.
unknown title 2011
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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.
Naturejobs - All Jobs Thomas S Shimizu 2010
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An important assumption of the model is that the ligand dissociation constant for binding sites depends on the activity state of the oligomer.
Naturejobs - All Jobs Thomas S Shimizu 2010
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Dr. Charles Glabe, an oligomer expert and a member of the Cure Alzheimer Fund research consortium, is also a co-author of the paper.
ruzuzu commented on the word oligomer
"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/)
February 1, 2012
dontcry commented on the word oligomer
Mmmm, my madeleines are a combination of musty wood, mothball-scented linens and strong coffee in the morning. I'm there - at the cottage.
February 2, 2012
fbharjo commented on the word oligomer
Or an oleogomer despite its marginal stickiness!
February 2, 2012