How to Use polymerase in a Sentence

polymerase

noun
  • The switch kicks in to stop the spiral from unzipping too far and lets the polymerase catch up.
    — NBC News, 20 June 2017
  • The piece of machinery in question is an enzyme called polymerase.
    — Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 19 Jan. 2011
  • As polymerase inhibitors, remdesivir and favipiravir are the same class of drug, Abbas said.
    — Naomi Xu Elegant, Fortune, 28 Mar. 2020
  • Attached to each loop is a polymerase enzyme, which serves a critical function every time a cell divides.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 2 Oct. 2025
  • The viral polymerase acid amplification test is performed with a nasal swab.
    — Steve Sadin, chicagotribune.com, 16 Oct. 2020
  • The drug is a polymerase inhibitor that induces a destructive number of mutations to the virus.
    — William A. Haseltine, Forbes, 4 Jan. 2022
  • This protein is the polymerase, which controls viral replication.
    — William A. Haseltine, Forbes, 17 Mar. 2021
  • And that will be carried out by a whole set of molecular machines, the polymerase and things like that, that are basically just doing that all the time in the cell.
    — Steven Strogatz, Quanta Magazine, 8 Mar. 2023
  • The low-frequency mutations originate from polymerase mistakes when copying the virus.
    — William A. Haseltine, Forbes, 28 Sep. 2021
  • The simplest, known as a polymerase chain reaction test, can find traces of the virus in the blood up until about a week after infection, and in urine for about 10 days.
    — Marc Santora, New York Times, 17 June 2016
  • But the chicken decoy mimics influenza's latching-on spot, so the polymerase attaches to the decoy and sits there uselessly.
    — Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 19 Jan. 2011
  • Those changes, particularly in the polymerase gene, are not present in most current day H5N1 viruses.
    — Helen Branswell, STAT, 4 May 2022
  • It has been shown to work against RNA-polymerase, the enzyme that is responsible for the virus multiplying.
    — Manavi Kapur, Quartz, 1 Oct. 2021
  • The researchers used its genes to resurrect the virus’ polymerase complex, a machinery consisting of three proteins that together copy the pathogen’s genome.
    — Kai Kupferschmidt, Science | AAAS, 17 May 2021
  • Another one of Wang’s projects, which is still at an early stage, also focuses on viral polymerase but has a different target to baloxavir.
    — Neil Savage, Scientific American, 18 Sep. 2019
  • In 2016, Zhu and his colleagues took a first stab at the task, synthesizing a mirror-image version of a polymerase from a virus.
    — Byrobert F. Service, science.org, 27 Oct. 2022
  • Once inside cells, the virus uses an enzyme called a polymerase to grab those building blocks and assemble them into new copies of viral RNA.
    — Stephani Sutherland, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2021
  • That said, this drug was designed with the intention of inhibiting the polymerase of a different virus (Ebola), so it wasn't guaranteed to work against coronavirus.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 1 May 2020
  • The experimental antiviral drug remdesivir targets this polymerase, for instance.
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 7 Apr. 2020
  • Before rush orders of the HCV drug and polymerase inhibitor combo can be placed, the therapy must be tested in animal models and clinical studies.
    — William A. Haseltine, Forbes, 5 May 2021
  • Molnupiravir, a type of antiviral drug called a polymerase inhibitor, works by stopping the virus’s genetic material from being replicated accurately.
    — NBC News, 12 Nov. 2021
  • The molecule that made the new RNAs most efficiently, known as polymerase ribozyme 24-3, worked surprisingly well.
    — Quanta Magazine, 25 Aug. 2016
  • These proteins stick to sections of DNA (typically close to the target gene) and recruit the polymerase enzyme to make an mRNA copy.
    — Philip Ball, Quanta Magazine, 18 June 2026
  • Once it is recopied, the replicating polymerase develops transition mutations, where a U nucleotide is converted to a C and a C to U.
    — William A. Haseltine, Forbes, 8 Oct. 2021
  • Canada generally accepts molecular Covid-19 tests, which look for the virus’s genetic material, such as polymerase chain-reaction tests.
    — Paul Vieira, WSJ, 3 Jan. 2022
  • The case went cold, but in 2001, authorities were able to review old evidence using a technology called PCR, or polymerase chain reaction.
    — Channon Hodge, CNN, 9 June 2017
  • So Ho is stacking his shelves with polymerase and protease inhibitors and other drugs that have been developed to fight HIV and other viruses like viral hepatitis, that can interfere with this replication.
    — Alice Park, Time, 26 Feb. 2020
  • To try to slow it, many countries are starting to deploy tests which, at some cost in accuracy, deliver their results much more rapidly than the polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) tests that were commonplace at the pandemic’s beginning.
    — The Economist, 14 Nov. 2020

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