taq polymerase
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.96 in modern English
29
Scrabble Score
13
Letters
2
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A thermostable DNA polymerase known for its relatively high rate of transcription errors.
Example Sentences
- "Another use of Taq polymerase is directly in DNA sequencing, where the high temperatures employed help reduce problems caused by secondary structure in the template and allow an increase in the stringency of primers used. Taq polymerase has, for the reasons mentioned earlier, become a very important tool for the molecular biologist."
- "Taq polymerase lacks a proofreading activity and as a result is unable to correct its errors."
- "If a PCR is performed with Taq polymerase and with 10,000 template molecules, producing a product that is 1000 bp long, 1% of the newly generated fragments will have a mutation in the first cycle."
Etymology
From the thermophilic bacterium Thermus aquaticus.