HETEROGENEITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does heterogeneity mean? 

• HETEROGENEITY (noun)
  The noun HETEROGENEITY has 1 sense:

1. the quality of being diverse and not comparable in kind

  Familiarity information: HETEROGENEITY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• HETEROGENEITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The quality of being diverse and not comparable in kind

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

heterogeneity; heterogeneousness

Hypernyms ("heterogeneity" is a kind of...):

nonuniformity (the quality of being diverse and interesting)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "heterogeneity"):

diverseness; diversity; multifariousness; variety (noticeable heterogeneity)

Antonym:

homogeneity (the quality of being similar or comparable in kind or nature)

Derivation:

heterogeneous (consisting of elements that are not of the same kind or nature)

 Context examples 

LAK cells exhibit a profound heterogeneity with regard to phenotype surface marker expression; it remains to be determined if they represent a unique cell lineage.

(Lymphokine-Activated Killer Cells, NCI Thesaurus)

There is genetic heterogeneity and phenotypic variability.

(Left Ventricular Non-Compaction Syndrome, NCI Thesaurus)

This multi-antigen/multi-pathway targeting strategy provides broad immunotherapeutic coverage with respect to tumor complexity and heterogeneity and may result in enhanced vaccine efficacy.

(IMT-1012 Immunotherapeutic Vaccine, NCI Thesaurus)

Morphologically, there is marked heterogeneity due to numerous patterns of differentiation coexisting in the same tumor.

(Ovarian Yolk Sac Tumor, NCI Thesaurus)

Due to alternative splicing, differential posttranslational modifications, optional binding to GHBP or alpha2-macroglobulin, and potential proteolytic processing, circulating GH shows great heterogeneity as a disulfide-linked or non-covalently associated monomer, dimer, trimer, tetramer, or pentamer in homopolymeric and heteropolymeric combinations.

(hGH Gene, NCI Thesaurus)

There are two types: (1) allelic heterogeneity - when different alleles at a locus can produce variable expression of a condition; and (2) locus heterogeneity - the term used to describe disease in which mutations at different loci can produce the same disease phenotype.

(Genetic Heterogeneity, NCI Dictionary)