Molecular Weight
The lower molecular weight compounds built from monomers are also referred to as dimers, trimers, tetramers, pentamers, octamers, 20-mers, etc. if they have 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, or 20 monomer units, respectively. Any number of these monomer units may be indicated by the appropriate Greek prefix; e.g. a decamer is formed from 10 monomers. Larger numbers are often stated in English or numbers instead of Greek. Molecules made of a small number of monomer units, up to a few dozen, are called oligomers.
Read more about this topic: Monomer
Famous quotes containing the word weight:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)