anneal
/əˈniːl
/verb [with object]
1Heat (metal or glass) and allow it to cool slowly, in order to remove internal stresses and toughen it: copper tubes must be annealed after bending or they will be brittle (as adjective annealing) the chimneys of annealing furnaces figurative Dr Lowenstein, annealed to hostility, looked at me coolly...
- The heat of welding will anneal the copper in the heat-affected area adjacent to the weld and reduce the strength provided by cold working.
- He says bright annealed stainless steel is generally specified for medical applications.
- The cold rolling process required that the steel be annealed or softened to keep the metal flexible and not brittle.
2 Biochemistry Recombine (DNA) in the double-stranded form.Consistent with the results of SUGIYAMA et al. 1998, 100% of the DNA was annealed by 2 min when 20 nM Rad 52 was included in the reaction....
- Sense and antisense RNAs were annealed to create double-stranded RNA by heating to 93°C for 30 s, followed by twenty-five 30-s incubations at 2° decrements for each incubation.
- The following oligonucleotide pairs were annealed to form double-stranded DNA and coinjected into worms along with the DNA components of the lacI / lacO system.
Derivatives
annealer
- The finished article is knocked off the iron and placed in an annealer where a constant temperature of 450 Celsius is maintained to stabilise the glass.
- Two furnaces melt glass, and there are five crucibles in which it is kept molten, and an equal number of annealers, in which the finished work is cooled down gently to prevent cracking.
- The steam blows out of the top annealer cap indicating a positive pressure in the annealer tube.
Origin
Old English onǣlan, from on + ǣlan 'burn, bake' from āl 'fire, burning'. The original sense was 'set on fire', hence (in late Middle English) 'subject to fire, alter by heating'.