isolatable

isolate +‎ -able

isolatable (comparative more isolatable, superlative most isolatable)

1. Able to be isolated.
   1. Able to be clearly separated from others; distinguishable.
      • 1991, Johnnella E. Butler, John Christopher Walter, Transforming the Curriculum: Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies, page 201:

        If gender identify were isolatable from class and race identity, if sexism were isolatable from classism and racism, we could talk about relations between men and women and never have to worry about whether their race or class were the same or different.

      • 2009, Mark I. Lichbach, Is Rational Choice Theory All of Social Science?, page 102:

        Rationalists think of actors as situated withn a multitude of isolatable variables that feed into a person's decision calculus. Human beings, however, do not think of themselves as facing a heap of disconnected variables; rather, they are aware of the rules and relationships within which they make choices.

      • 2009, Peter Juel Henrichsen, Linguistic Theory and Raw Sound, page 76:

        However , in many cases the words are not isolatable for various reasons, e.g. in highly truncated phrases as the ones mentioned in (12).

      • 2020, Scott Berman, Platonism and the Objects of Science:

        Again, at a more detailed or more fine-grained scale of measurement, other spatiotemporally extended complex dynamical systems are isolatable from their larger environment, that is, those biological systems, and these systems are the cellular systems.

   2. Able to be placed in isolation; able to be put in a state free from outside influence.
      • 1938 January 4, Herbert Dan Galvin, “Cooking, Heating, or Like Apparatus for Treating Tins of Food or Other Articles”, in Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, page 159:

        A can transfer valve device comprising a housing having a vertical conduit therein for the passage of the cans by gravity action, there being an inlet opening for the cans at the top end of this conduit, a pair of vertically spaced valve plates slidable within the housing and across the conduit to define an isolatable portion of the conduit between them, […]

      • 1984, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Unresolved Safety Issues: Pressurized Thermal Shock, page 428:

        If, for example, the small break LOCA were to occur in a location where the break were isolatable by operator action to close a valve, then the threat to the vessel would be greater due to ( a ) repressurization to full system pressure and (b) no credit could be taken for the ameliorating effect of warm prestress.

      • 1992, Major Hazards Onshore and Offshore, page 562:

        The first stage in the methodology is therefore to identify isolatable inventories and the second is to identify the platform areas or modules in which the isolatable inventories exist.

   3. Able to be extracted in pure form.
      • 1957, Communicationes Veterinariae - Volumes 1-3, page 52:

        Bacillus anthracis: from the first up to the sixth day, this microorganism was isolatable, or in other words still alive.

      • 1996, Shuryo Nakai, H. Wayne Modler, Food Proteins: Properties and Characterization, page 60:

        The recently determined atomic structure of the intact myosin head, however, indicates that there is little correlation between any structural domains of the head and the well-studied 25, 50, and 20 KDA isolatable subdomains.

      • 2022, Marija Grech, Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene, page 55:

        While practices of cryopreservation are, as we have seen, predicated on the assumption that life is autonomous and isolatable and that it can be extracted out of its lived environment so as to be preserved ex-situ, the continued dependence of preserved biological matter on the environments with and within which it exists reveals that life is never extractable from its environment—not even in its supposedly most singular and isolatable state.

• isolable