bioassay

American  

[bahy-oh-uh-sey, -as-ey, bahy-oh-uh-sey] / ˌbaɪ oʊ əˈseɪ, -ˈæs eɪ, ˌbaɪ oʊ əˈseɪ /

noun

1. determination of the biological activity or potency of a substance, as a vitamin or hormone, by testing its effect on the growth of an organism.

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verb (used with object)

bioassayed, bioassaying

1. to subject to a bioassay.

bioassay British  

noun

1. a method of determining the concentration, activity, or effect of a change to substance by testing its effect on a living organism and comparing this with the activity of an agreed standard

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verb

1. (tr) to subject to a bioassay

bioassay Scientific  

/ bī′ō-ăs′ā′,-ă-sā′ /

1. Determination of the relative purity of a substance, such as a drug or hormone, by comparing its effects with those of a standard preparation on a culture of living cells or a test organism.

2. A test used to determine such purity.

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Etymology

Origin of bioassay

First recorded in 1910–15; bio(logical) + assay

Example Sentences

The students interpreted the bacterium's bioassay data and concluded it had antibiotic activity and produced a never-before-seen compound.

From Science Daily • Dec. 2, 2024

Here we couple high-throughput nanomole-scale synthesis with a label-free affinity-selection mass spectrometry bioassay.

From Nature • Apr. 22, 2018

Radioactive particles were detected on 14 vehicles, and by Thursday 240 workers had requested bioassay tests to determine whether they might have breathed in contamination.

From Seattle Times • Dec. 22, 2017

A high-throughput cell-based prion bioassay has been used to systematically screen around 20,000 unique experimental conditions to generate prions from rPrP in a manner that is conceptually similar to a matrix approach to protein crystallization59.

From Nature • Nov. 8, 2016

I felt like if I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t develop this bioassay to study angiogenesis.

From Scientific American • Feb. 10, 2015