Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Electrophoresis
/ɪˌlɛktroʊfəˈriːsɪs/noun
The movement of charged particles through a gel or fluid under an electric field, used to separate proteins and DNA by size.
The Greek roots
ἤλεκτρον
ḗlektron
amber
φόρησις
phórēsis
a carrying
Literally: “carrying by amber”
The story of the word
The first half is amber, the fossil resin that picks up chaff when you rub it; Greek observation of that trick eventually named the whole of electricity. The second half is φέρειν, to carry, the verb inside metaphor and euphoria. Arne Tiselius built the apparatus that made protein separation practical in the 1930s and took the 1948 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. Every gel photograph in a molecular biology paper is that idea, scaled down.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- early 20th century
Same family
electronmetaphorphosphoruseuphoriadiaphoresis
In a sentence
Gel electrophoresis sorted the fragments into a ladder within the hour.