thumb|Depiction of the restriction enzyme (endonuclease) [[HindIII cleaving a double-stranded DNA molecule at a valid restriction site ().]]
thumb|Depiction of the restriction enzyme (endonuclease) [[HindIII cleaving a double-stranded DNA molecule at a valid restriction site ().]]
In biochemistry, a nuclease (also archaically known as nucleodepolymerase or polynucleotidase) is an enzyme capable of cleaving the phosphodiester bonds that link nucleotides together to form nucleic acids. Nucleases variously affect single and double stranded breaks in their target molecules. In living organisms, they are essential machinery for many aspects of DNA repair. Defects in certain nucleases can cause genetic instability or immunodeficiency. Nucleases are also extensively used in molecular cloning.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).