How to Use oligonucleotide in a Sentence

oligonucleotide

noun
  • The newest oligonucleotide drugs are designed to tackle rare diseases.
    — Lydia Denworth, Scientific American, 3 Mar. 2020
  • To that end, the researchers turned to something called antisense oligonucleotides.
    — Lydia Denworth, Scientific American, 3 Mar. 2020
  • This one, known as an antisense oligonucleotide, is designed to prevent cells from making a protein that's central to the disease.
    — Jon Hamilton, NPR, 15 May 2024
  • But any chain that is short—usually 15 to 20 nucleotides—is considered an oligonucleotide.
    — Lydia Denworth, Scientific American, 3 Mar. 2020
  • The company's encoding starts with a library of dozens to hundreds of short pieces of DNA called oligos (short for oligonucleotide).
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 15 Sep. 2022
  • An alternative treatment, drugs based on chemicals known as antisense oligonucleotides, is in clinical trials.
    — Nicholas Wade, New York Times, 31 Dec. 2015
  • In April 2024, Parekh got a personalized drug called an antisense oligonucleotide, or ASO.
    — Kaitlin Sullivan, NBC news, 28 Aug. 2025
  • Upon receipt, the sequence is run through biosafety and biosecurity checks, and ultimately constructed through the enzymatic assembly of shorter oligonucleotide chains.
    — Jeffrey Marlow, WIRED, 31 Mar. 2015
  • Another therapeutic approach, called antisense oligonucleotides, can only address a minority of patients and has to be given repeatedly.
    — Karen Weintraub, USA TODAY, 22 June 2023
  • But one patient advocacy group has publicly shared that Yu’s team has designed an oligonucleotide for a toddler with ataxia-telangiectasia, a neurodegenerative disorder, and hoped to begin to treat her this fall.
    — Jocelyn Kaiser, Science | AAAS, 9 Oct. 2019
  • Krainer is co-founder of Stoke Therapeutics, a company focused on treating severe genetic disease using antisense oligonucleotides.
    — Bret Stetka, Scientific American, 15 Aug. 2019
  • The drug is a synthetic genetic molecule — known as an oligonucleotide — similar to Biogen’s therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, Spinraza.
    — Ryan Cross, BostonGlobe.com, 8 Dec. 2022
  • For years, the most promising treatments were antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), which are delivered by recurring injections into a patient’s cerebrospinal fluid.
    — Allison Parshall, Scientific American, 30 Sep. 2025
  • In 2018, Mila received the world’s first individualized antisense oligonucleotide, developed in under a year.
    — Judy Stecker, STAT, 27 Feb. 2026
  • These sequences of nucleotides, called oligonucleotides, are synthesized into DNA and integrated into living organisms, like bacteria or viruses.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 7 Mar. 2019
  • This was exactly the data that Yu needed to answer his next big question on the broader applications of individualized antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) therapies.
    — Bree Iskandar, STAT, 12 July 2023
  • Avidity specializes in developing an innovative class of ribonucleic acid (RNA) therapeutics called antibody oligonucleotide conjugates.
    — Liz Napolitano, CNBC, 26 Oct. 2025
  • The drug, which is called RES-010, works by employing an antisense oligonucleotide, a synthetic bit of genetic material that blocks the action of an RNA molecule known as miR-22.
    — New Atlas, 21 Sep. 2025

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