thymine

From thymus +‎ -ine. Thymine was first isolated in 1893 by Albrecht Kossel and Albert Neumann from calves' thymus glands, hence its name.

• IPA^(key): /ˈθaɪmɪn/

thymine (countable and uncountable, plural thymines)

1. (organic chemistry, genetics) A heterocyclic base, 5-methylpyrimidine-2,4(1H,3H)-dione; it pairs with adenine in DNA.

   Coordinate terms: adenine, cytosine, guanine

   • 1997, Ian McEwan, Enduring Love, Vintage (1998), page 164:

     Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written — adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine.

   • 2015 October 16, “Polyanionic Carboxyethyl Peptide Nucleic Acids ( ce -PNAs): Synthesis and DNA Binding”, in PLOS ONE‎^[1], →DOI:

     In a recent paper on homopyrimidine decamers containing aeg-monomers and thymine monomers with a sulfomethyl substituent at the γ-position, similar triplexes has also been described [43 ].

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thymine f (plural thymines)

1. thymine

• “thymine”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.