How to Use adenine in a Sentence

adenine

noun
  • Four chemical bases — adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine — bond with hydrogen to make base pairings.
    — Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, Discover Magazine, 15 Apr. 2022
  • Some errors are subtle such as a switch of a single nucleotide, for example a guanine (G) to an adenine (A).
    — Carolyn Graybeal, Discover Magazine, 8 Sep. 2014
  • All genes consists of base pairs made of adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C).
    — Manasee Wagh, Popular Mechanics, 1 Apr. 2022
  • Maybe an adenine gets swapped with a uracil (a substitution mutation that could also occur with any of the base pairs), or perhaps one or more bases get inserted or deleted.
    — Quanta Magazine, 25 Feb. 2021
  • Stuck to every sugar is a base—the As (adenine), Gs (guanine), Cs (cytosine), and Ts (thymine).
    — Sarah Scoles, Scientific American, 13 Jan. 2023
  • Each gene consists of some number of base pairs made of adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C).
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 3 June 2021
  • And there was a key experiment done by Joan Oró, showing that cyanide could assemble to make adenine fairly efficiently.
    — Quanta Magazine, 1 June 2022
  • All living organisms have DNA that is made of four nucleotide bases–adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 17 Apr. 2024
  • Ryugu contains roughly comparable amounts of the nucleobases, adenine and guanine (known as purines), to cytosine, thymine, and uracil (pyrimidines).
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 17 Mar. 2026
  • The bases are often referred to as A, C, G and T, the initials of their full chemical names, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.
    — The Economist, 26 Oct. 2017
  • In all living things, DNA is naturally composed of four compounds, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 6 July 2011
  • Those rungs are made up of pairs of four different chemical building blocks, called bases — adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine (A,T,C and G).
    — F.d. Flam, Mercury News, 26 Nov. 2025
  • These symbols represent the four basic chemical letters, or bases, the body uses to form DNA--guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 30 Dec. 2010
  • The molecules are called bases and are represented by the letters A (adenine), T (thymine), G (guanine), and C (cytosine).
    — IEEE Spectrum, 22 Feb. 2016
  • The molecule is made up of the chemical bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—shortened to A, C, G, and T—which pair off to form a double helix.
    — Emily Mullin, WIRED, 4 Dec. 2023
  • The vast chains of DNA in each cell are made of just four molecules — adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine — arranged in enormously varied configurations.
    — Gina Kolata, The Seattle Times, 12 July 2017
  • But there may have been traces of some of the components, like adenine, because, actually, cyanide is made in those Miller-Urey type experiments, and cyanide fairly easily assembles into adenine.
    — Quanta Magazine, 1 June 2022
  • Rather than inducing random changes in the virus’ RNA genome, the drug is more likely to cause specific nucleic acid substitutions, with guanine switching to adenine and cytosine to uracil.
    — Byrobert F. Service, science.org, 1 Feb. 2023
  • This four-tone greeting is not a specific communication per-se, but the nucleotides of guanine, uracil, adenine, and cytosine, which represent the building blocks of RNA.
    — Jeff Spry, Space.com, 14 Nov. 2025
  • Tobacco Doctors already knew that tobacco could cause cancer, but Alexandrov’s work showed how—by preferentially mutating certain bases (such as cytosine) into others (adenine).
    — Jacqueline Detwiler, Popular Mechanics, 19 Mar. 2018
  • The vitamin can help compensate for defects in the body’s ability to make a molecule, called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), which researchers have linked for the first time to healthy fetal development in humans.
    — Gretchen Vogel, Science | AAAS, 9 Aug. 2017
  • This team, led by JAXA biogeochemist Toshiki Koga, analysed two Ryugu samples returned by Hayabusa 2, finding adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 17 Mar. 2026
  • Scientists have discovered that a sample of the Ryugu asteroid collected by Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft contains the nucleobases adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil, the building blocks of DNA and RNA upon which all life is based.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 17 Mar. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'adenine.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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