How to Use base pair in a Sentence

base pair

1 of 2 noun
  • The mix of mint and lemon with a matcha base pairs well with fresh peaches or madeleines, Schwartz says.
    — Meg Lappe, SELF, 7 Oct. 2017
  • Each time a cell replicates, about 20 base pairs are lost from the telomere, or shoelace cap.
    — Sandee Lamotte, CNN, 18 Nov. 2019
  • So the molecular cause is exactly the same base pair change in a telomerase gene.
    — Linda Marsa, Discover Magazine, 31 Aug. 2016
  • So far treating sickle cell via base pair editing has only been shown to work in mice, not humans.
    — Leah Rosenbaum, Forbes, 2 June 2021
  • The smallest belongs to the common bent-wing bat, at just under 2 billion base pairs.
    — Mark Johnson and Dino Grandoni, Anchorage Daily News, 28 Apr. 2023
  • Most of them are genetic caused by a single misspelling in the genes out of 3 billion base pairs, one of them is screwed up.
    — Taylor Wilson, USA TODAY, 24 May 2023
  • So far even in the virus's most divergent strains scientists have found only 11 base pair changes.
    — Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY, 27 Mar. 2020
  • Adding those base pairs back in the lab made the virus much better at replicating in several cell culture models.
    — Kai Kupferschmidt, Science | AAAS, 9 Mar. 2020
  • Such an altered base pair, known as a tautomer, can quickly jump back to its original arrangement.
    — Lars Fischer, Scientific American, 18 Aug. 2022
  • Picture a ladder that twists like a corkscrew, with the sugar and phosphate acting as the side rails and the base pairs acting as the rungs.
    — Ryan Rossotto, National Geographic, 12 June 2019
  • As of now, prime editing can still edit only about 40 base pairs at a time among the billions of pairs in the human genome.
    — Paolo Confino, Fortune, 10 Aug. 2023
  • But while most geneticists are focusing on a few thousand base pairs at a time, some researchers are thinking bigger.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 7 Dec. 2022
  • That’s about 16 billion base pairs — the molecular links of a DNA chain.
    — Quanta Magazine, 1 Aug. 2017
  • This means that the base pair is embedded in a coding gene, as opposed to much of the genome which isn't translated into proteins.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 24 Apr. 2011
  • Within those chromosomes are around 3 billion base pairs of DNA.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 7 Dec. 2022
  • The basic unit of DNA is the base pair, one of the rungs on the twisted ladder that makes up the double helix.
    — Cathleen O'Grady, Ars Technica, 24 Nov. 2018
  • Each copy of the genome — almost every cell has its own copy — consists of about 3 billion base pairs lined up in the famous double helix structure.
    — The Physics Arxiv Blog, Discover Magazine, 9 Aug. 2023
  • Changing the Rules The ability to increase the number of base pairs or amino acids changes the rules of that game entirely.
    — Quanta Magazine, 2 Jan. 2018
  • And in every case, the mutation involved the loss of hundreds to thousands of DNA base pairs.
    — Quanta Magazine, 5 Feb. 2019
  • Crispr is, however, already beginning to reshape the physical world around us in much less radical ways, one base pair at a time.
    — Megan Molteni, WIRED, 27 Apr. 2018
  • Add in another base pair, and the number of potential words increases to 216.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 30 Nov. 2017
  • Procedure Pick a prepared strip of paper (a base pair) and stick one end to one backbone and the other end to the other parallel backbone.
    — Scientific American, 9 Aug. 2018
  • The prevailing wisdom said that DNA should have been too riddled with base pair errors to say anything of value about the past.
    — Quanta Magazine, 29 May 2019
  • The base pairing that holds the double helix together always involves pairing a one-ringed base with a two-ringed base, which maintains a constant width of the helix.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 4 Oct. 2019
  • Today Twist charges nine cents a base pair for DNA, a nearly tenfold decrease from the industry standard a decade ago.
    — New York Times, 24 Nov. 2021
  • Schwartz’s team aims to help scientists go far beyond changing individual base pairs (the most basic units of DNA).
    — Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, 11 Mar. 2021
  • Indeed, all the beautiful permutations of the human form — the differences between the tallest and shortest, the brown-eyed and the green-eyed — are explained by just a tiny fraction of those base pairs.
    — Brian Resnick, Vox, 23 Aug. 2018
  • In contrast, the introduction of a single synthetic base pair expands the selection of possible amino acids to 172.
    — Carl Engelking, Discover Magazine, 7 May 2014
  • Conveniently, just one DNA base pair differs between the Neanderthal gene and the modern human one.
    — Jon Cohen, Science | AAAS, 20 June 2018
  • Instead of just focusing on one base pair, A/C/G/T, the method looks at the correlations of bases across a sequence of the chromosome.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 29 Apr. 2012

base pair

2 of 2 verb
  • The human genome holds about three billion base pairs within each cell.
    — Bojan Stojkovski, Interesting Engineering, 10 Aug. 2025
  • As a rule of thumb, the shorter the sequence or read of base pairs, the older the DNA, Meyer-Kaiser said.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN Money, 7 Nov. 2025
  • The team measured the length of each human DNA fragment in the samples by calculating the number of base pairs along each strand.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN Money, 7 Nov. 2025
  • The upshot is that there is a sequence of light flashes, at a rate of about three per second, that reveals the sequence of base pairs in the DNA sample.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 2 Oct. 2025
  • Each species’ genome contains billions of base pairs, and even small mutations (a few hundred or thousand changes) create new biological identities.
    — Big Think, 29 Oct. 2025
  • Short reads can turn up single base-pair mutations, while longer reads are better for detecting complicated variations like deletions or insertions of thousands of base pairs.
    — Dmitri Pavlichin, IEEE Spectrum, 22 Aug. 2018
  • In the samples, the scientists found peaks of sequences that were 40 base pairs in length, suggesting the human DNA had been there for a longer period of time.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN Money, 7 Nov. 2025
  • Eventually, the sum total of indexes constitutes a dictionary, in which each entry isn’t a word but a short sequence of DNA base pairs.
    — Dmitri Pavlichin, IEEE Spectrum, 22 Aug. 2018
  • For example, after a creature’s genome is sequenced, the huge mass of raw genetic data—consisting of millions or billions of genetic building blocks called base pairs—must be annotated.
    — Glenn Zorpette, IEEE Spectrum, 4 Nov. 2025
  • Depending on the sequencing technology used, a read can vary in length from about 100 to 100,000 base pairs, and the total number of reads varies from millions to tens of billions.
    — Dmitri Pavlichin, IEEE Spectrum, 22 Aug. 2018
  • That may mean sequencing each DNA base pair many times, often more than 100, to distinguish the rare variations from the more common ones and also the real differences from the sequencing errors.
    — Dmitri Pavlichin, IEEE Spectrum, 22 Aug. 2018
  • For instance, the bacterium Carsonella ruddii, which lives as a symbiont within the guts of sap-feeding insects, has an even smaller genome than Sukunaarchaeum, at around 159,000 base pairs.
    — Jake Buehler, Quanta Magazine, 24 Nov. 2025
  • For barcoding purposes, typical DNA sequences of the CO1 gene run between 400 and 800 base pairs.
    — Glenn Zorpette, IEEE Spectrum, 4 Nov. 2025
  • Unlike bipedal humanoids, the Onero H1 uses a wheeled base paired with articulated arms, prioritizing stability and dexterity over walking.
    — Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 8 Jan. 2026
  • Another advantage of the ONT PromethION system is its ability to process fragments of DNA with as many as a million base pairs.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 2 Oct. 2025
  • The genome of the female violet copper butterfly, which inhabits a huge swath of territory stretching from the Pyrenees to Siberia, consists of 25 pairs of chromosomes with a total of 547,306,268 base pairs.
    — Glenn Zorpette, IEEE Spectrum, 4 Nov. 2025
  • Finding short fragments of DNA less than 40 base pairs long is an initial positive indicator of older DNA, but other environmental factors might be at play, according to Elena Irene Zavala, an assistant professor in forensic genetics at the University of Copenhagen.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN Money, 7 Nov. 2025

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

Last Updated: