To combine or cause to combine two identical or similar molecular units into a dimer, or to undergo the process of forming a dimeric structure.
From 'dimer' + '-ize' (to make or become). The suffix '-ize' is a productive English verb-forming element, and 'dimerize' emerged in chemistry in the 20th century to describe molecular assembly processes.
When a protein dimerizes, it's often triggered by specific conditions like pH or binding to another molecule—this makes dimerization a biological on/off switch, and many diseases involve broken dimerization systems where proteins can't pair up correctly.
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