thymine

noun

Etymology: From thymus + -ine. Thymine was first isolated in 1893 by Albrecht Kossel and Albert Neumann from calves' thymus glands, hence its name.

1. A heterocyclic base, 5-methylpyrimidine-2,4(1H,3H)-dione; it pairs with adenine in DNA.

   “Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written — adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine.”

   “In a recent paper on homopyrimidine decamers containing aeg-monomers and thymine monomers with a sulfomethyl substituent at the γ-position, similar triplexes has also been described [43 ].”