How to Use guanine in a Sentence

guanine

noun
  • Each floor, called a tetrad, has a guanine (G) base on all four corners.
    — Breanna Draxler, Discover Magazine, 27 Jan. 2014
  • The top layer of chameleon skin contains guanine crystals arranged in a lattice.
    — Christie Wilcox, Discover Magazine, 13 Mar. 2015
  • Adenine always pairs with thymine, and guanine always pairs with cytosine.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 2 Oct. 2025
  • Blue sharks’ changing skin color is enabled by a combination of guanine crystals and melanosomes.
    — Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harpers Magazine, 19 Sep. 2025
  • Four chemical bases — adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine — bond with hydrogen to make base pairings.
    — Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, Discover Magazine, 15 Apr. 2022
  • The low prevalence of uracil sequences is connotated by an enrichment for guanine and cytosine sequences.
    — William A. Haseltine, Forbes, 28 Oct. 2021
  • All genes consists of base pairs made of adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C).
    — Manasee Wagh, Popular Mechanics, 1 Apr. 2022
  • Glass mirrors are made with a thin coating of metal; with fish, the reflective effect comes from stacks of super-thin plate-like crystals of the chemical compound guanine.
    — Helen Czerski, WSJ, 17 Dec. 2020
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • According to the study authors, the layered crystalline guanine platelets could provide insights into biomimetic designs that maximize and recycle leaked light, rather than merely reflect emitted light.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 26 May 2026
  • 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
  • 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
  • Adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine are the four bases of the genetic code that make up the rungs of the double helix structure of DNA by forming specific pairs (adenine pairs with thymine, guanine with cytosine).
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 17 Mar. 2026
  • Future medical devices To map this phenomenon, the team manipulated the guanine crystals using electromagnets to shift their positions while exposing them to an external light source.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 26 May 2026
  • Temozolomide—the standard of care for glioblastoma—works by depositing a methyl group onto the DNA of cells, specifically on guanine, one of DNA’s four base molecules.
    — Isabella Backman, Hartford Courant, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Huntington’s disease is caused by over-amplification of nucleotide repeat sequence CAG (cytosine-adenine-guanine) in the the gene huntingtin, causing the pathology.
    — Charlotte Hu, Discover Magazine, 13 Feb. 2018
  • 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 'guanine.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: