Definition of "oligomer" [o•lig•o•mer]

• A polymer that consists of two, three, or four monomers. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "I concluded that H3 and H4 must form a dimer, and I thought I might crystallize and solve the structure of this unique histone oligomer."
• "The rate of such changes and the mean length of such oligomers are dependent on the thermodynamic context (in the extreme case, an ice crystal may be considered as a single such oligomer, the crystal structure being dependent on the fixed, strong hydrogen bonds)."
• "K172 indicated that the 392-amino acid-residue-long bacterial enzyme 6-aminohexanoic acid linear oligomer hydrolase involved in degradation of nylon oligomers is specified by an alternative open reading frame of the preexisted coding sequence that originally specified a 472-residue-long arginine-rich protein. sanjait"