How to Use ligand in a Sentence

ligand

noun
  • The drugs mimic the LRP1’s ligands and bind to Aβ for crossing the blood-brain barrier.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 7 Oct. 2025
  • The team enhanced the design using small-molecule amidinium ligands.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 12 Jan. 2026
  • One common example of a ligand is found in siderophores, chemical compounds that bacteria secrete to break down iron particles.
    — Emily Underwood, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Jan. 2020
  • One common example of a ligand is found in siderophores, chemical compounds that bacteria secrete to break down iron particles.
    — Emily Underwood, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Jan. 2020
  • At the intersection, the ligand between society and art is the medium of photography.
    — Caterina De Biasio, Vogue, 20 Mar. 2024
  • The secret is using nontoxic silicon nanocrystals and molecule glues called ligands.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 3 Dec. 2019
  • So, ligands can help microRNAs home specifically to diseased cells while avoiding healthy cells.
    — Andrea Kasinski, The Conversation, 7 Oct. 2024
  • The drug nanoparticles were precisely engineered for a specific size and surface ligands (a molecule that binds to another).
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 7 Oct. 2025
  • The palladium can link up with four ligands at a time, which can link up with other palladium-ligand groups to form the cage-like structures; the more palladium atoms in the mix, the bigger the cages.
    — Bill Andrews, Discover Magazine, 18 July 2018
  • These opioid receptors when stimulated and/or inhibited by the body's natural ligands have been known to be involved in the body's itch circuitry.
    — Sacramento Bee, 29 Jan. 2024
  • These opioid receptors when stimulated and/or inhibited by the body's natural ligands have been known to be involved in the body's itch circuitry.
    — Sacramento Bee, 5 Feb. 2024
  • Researchers took nanocrystals of silicon and closely examined them in order to design ligands, which are like molecule glue, that can hook into the nanocrystals and carry more energy.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 3 Dec. 2019
  • The system can also explore variations in ligand structures, molecules that bind to the surface of the nanocrystals, which play an important role in determining their properties.
    — Kapil Kajal, Interesting Engineering, 26 Aug. 2025
  • The uranium molecule complex is a coordination compound, meaning a metal center with ligands surrounding it.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 13 Jan. 2020
  • Identifying ligands that can deliver small RNAs to other cells requires finding receptors expressed at high enough levels on the surface of target cells.
    — Andrea Kasinski, The Conversation, 7 Oct. 2024
  • Traditionally, researchers improve catalysts by changing the central metal, such as iron, cobalt, or nickel, or by redesigning the surrounding molecular structure known as a ligand.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 1 June 2026
  • Gold nanoclusters, which contain fewer than 100 atoms, are usually created by giving gold ions extra electrons while surrounding molecules called ligands keep them stable.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 6 Sep. 2025
  • The team also highlighted the architecture’s adaptability, which can support different metals and ligands depending on the target reaction.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 3 Dec. 2025
  • These drugs, especially intravenous zoledronic acid (and the antibody to RANK ligand, denosumab), have been game-changers in patients with breast and other cancers that spread to bone.
    — Dr. Keith Roach, oregonlive, 9 Aug. 2022
  • Additional experiments showed that certain signals from the cells’ environment — including one molecule called KIT ligand, which promotes cell growth — helped determine which way the cells went, the release stated.
    — Khloe Quill, FOXNews.com, 22 Oct. 2025
  • Postdoctoral researcher Dr David Husbands used the platform to pair nearly 200 different ligands with five metals, creating more than 700 unique metal complexes in under seven days.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 23 Dec. 2025
  • Researchers from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM have carried out the largest quantum-classical chemistry simulation to date, modeling protein-ligand systems with more than 12,000 atoms.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 6 May 2026
  • For enterprises, the model is also packaged as Boltz-2 NIM, a production-ready microservice that ingests protein, RNA, DNA, or ligand sequences and returns 3D structures and affinity predictions with enterprise support.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 20 Aug. 2025
  • On Recursion’s BioHive-2 supercomputer—ranked among the world’s most powerful—Boltz-2 can process millions of ligand-protein pairs in parallel, returning binding results in about 20 seconds per pair on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 20 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ligand.' 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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