expressing

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of express.

   He spent the whole meeting expressing concerns about the new budget.

   Artists find countless ways of expressing emotion on the canvas.

   Note

   The same -ing spelling does two grammatical jobs. After a form of be it is a participle (she was expressing doubts). As a gerund it acts like a noun yet still takes an object (expressing doubt takes courage). It carries every sense of the verb, so it covers pressing out as well as putting into words: expressing milk belongs to the squeezing sense. In the lab, genes can be expressing too, and that use stands behind the biochemistry adjective.

2. 2
   adjective

   Actively transcribing or translating nucleic acid to produce the products encoded by a gene.

   The researchers isolated the expressing tissue to measure its protein output.

   Strongly expressing clones were selected for the next round of analysis.

   Note

   Biologists use it to sort material, and it usually stands before the noun it classifies: expressing cells, expressing tissue, expressing clones. It is not comparable, because a cell is either expressing or it is not. Degree goes into an adverb such as strongly, which reports how much product appears. When the word works as a verb, as in a gene expressing a protein, it belongs to the participle.

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