Test Your Vocabulary

Take Our 10-Question Quiz

Name That Thing

Take our visual vocab quiz

Test Your Knowledge »

True or False?

A quick quiz about stuff worth knowing

Take It Now »

Join Us on FB & Twitter

Get the Word of the Day and More

Facebook | Twitter

anneal


an·neal

vt \ə-ˈnē(ə)l\

Definition of ANNEAL

1
: to heat and then cool (as steel or glass) usually for softening and making less brittle
2
: to heat and then cool (double-stranded nucleic acid) in order to separate strands and induce combination at lower temperatures especially with complementary strands
intransitive verb
: to be capable of combining with complementary nucleic acid by a process of heating and cooling <some bacterial nucleic acid anneals well with eukaryotic DNA>