4 ms·
Interesting… at least in my field, the prefix “micro” gets abbreviated with a “u” since it looks very close to the lowercase Greek letter μ (mu), as “micro” its
by georgeburdell 2y ago
Interesting… at least in my field, the prefix “micro” gets abbreviated with a “u” since it looks very close to the lowercase Greek letter μ (mu), as “micro” itself is Greek in origin
- LordKeren 2y agoTypically I see “u” used in instances where it is the actual SI Unit prefix for 10^-6, and leaving it as “mirco” is used when in its more common form for “very small”
- bratwurst3000 2y agowas thinking the same. it could be mi instead of u because the other one are not size related
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aquafox 2y agoIn this case, the phrase micro does mean the metric prefix 10^-6, but just "smaller than mRNA". The important unit in biology is nucleotides [1], which are the elements specifying the composition of proteins (loosely speaking, the "atoms of biology"). mRNA typically has on the order of thousands of nucleotides, whereas miRNAs have about 20 nucleotides. The physical size of miRNAs is actually ~3nm. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3500609/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3500609/
- georgeburdell 2y agoYes, but it’s quite common to use “micro” to mean “small” in some technical fields. Example: Microprocessor