Biochemistry, Pharmacology. the selective attachment or influence of one substance on another, as an antibiotic and its target organism or an antibody and its specific antigen.
Origin of specificity
First recorded in 1875–80; specific + -ity
OTHER WORDS FROM specificity
non·spec·i·fic·i·ty,noun
Words nearby specificity
specific heat capacity, specific humidity, specific immune globulin, specific immunity, specific impulse, specificity, specific name, specific opsonin, specific parasite, specific performance, specific phobia
The enzymes could be designed to target longer sequences with more specificity, but that was a much more arduous and complex process than it is with CRISPR.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded for CRISPR ‘Genetic Scissors’|Jordana Cepelewicz|October 7, 2020|Quanta Magazine
For example, if an advertiser wants to find a person with a specific job, age and gender through a display banner, it’s likely impossible, she said, and no publisher is going to be able to achieve that specificity on their own.
‘Ripped the Band-Aid on some hard decisions’: How The New York Times is reshaping its ad business for a cookie-less world|Kayleigh Barber|September 21, 2020|Digiday
Custom audiences can give you more flexibility and specificity with your targeting and are designed to automatically choose the right audience based on the inputs you provide and your campaign goal and bid strategy.
Google custom audiences, the combo of custom affinity and custom intent audiences, now live|Ginny Marvin|September 14, 2020|Search Engine Land
That lack of specificity may be to protect the sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Did Trump call US war dead “losers” and “suckers”? The controversy, explained.|Alex Ward|September 4, 2020|Vox
But everything in Abbudin feels willfully generic, as if even the tiniest hint of specificity might give offense.
Generic and Superficial ‘Tyrant’ Amerisplains the Middle East|Andrew Romano|June 25, 2014|DAILY BEAST
The specificity of the reporting instructions are strangely comforting… follow these steps exactly, and you will live.
Telling My Family That I’m Leaving Again for Afghanistan|Nick Willard|April 9, 2014|DAILY BEAST
So broad is this metaphor that it risks denying the actual man—and his actual struggle—of all his specificity, all his complexity.
The statistical probability that an individual who does not have the particular disease being tested for will be correctly identified as negative, expressed as the proportion of true negative results to the total of true negative and false positive results.