from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun A muscle, gland, or organ capable of responding to a stimulus, especially a nerve impulse.
noun A nerve ending that carries impulses to a muscle, gland, or organ and activates muscle contraction or glandular secretion.
noun Biochemistry A small molecule or protein that alters biochemical processes in a cell, as by decreasing or increasing the activity of an enzyme.
noun Computers A device used to produce a desired change in an object in response to input.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun See effecter.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun An effecter.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun biology Any muscle, organ etc. that can respond to a stimulus from a nerve.
noun biology The part of a nerve that carries a stimulus to a muscle etc.
noun biology Any small molecule that effects the function of an enzyme by binding to an allosteric site.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun one who brings about a result or event; one who accomplishes a purpose
noun a nerve fiber that terminates on a muscle or gland and stimulates contraction or secretion
noun an organ (a gland or muscle) that becomes active in response to nerve impulses
Etymologies
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Examples
She said the new findings reinforce the notion that V. para kills a host cell through the combined efforts of several so-called effector proteins working together rather than through the actions of a single protein.
She said the new findings reinforce the notion that V. para kills a host cell through the combined efforts of several so-called effector proteins working together rather than through the actions of a single protein.
Its primary way of killing cancer cells is by eliciting an immune response, drawing what are known as effector cells (various types of killer white blood cells) to the tumor and activating them.
Professor Alan Cowman, head of the institute's Infection and Immunity division, said the parasite remodels the red blood cells by exporting hundreds of so-called 'effector' proteins into the cytoplasm of the red blood cell.
But a few of these "effector" T cells survive and become memory T cells, ensuring that the immune system can respond faster and stronger the next time around.
In particular we identified a large number of so-called effector genes that are critical to pathogenesis that had been previously unknown and are extremely challenging to predict because of their small size and unusual structure. "
In the first study, Satoshi Nishimura and colleagues from the University of Tokyo show that CD8+ effector T cells play an important role in macrophage recruitment and adipose tissue inflammation.
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