A graduate student in chemistry

Source text:

A palindromic sequence is a nucleic acid sequence that reads the same no matter from the 5′ end of the sequence itself or from the 5′ end of its complementary strand. It has a potential to form a hairpin structure.

Source:

Huang Franklin W., et al. “Highly Recurrent Tert Promoter Mutations in Human Melanoma.” Science 339.6122 (2013): 957-59.

Writer’s text:

In DNA, when read on the 5¹ to 3¹ strand,  a palindromic sequence will read the same backwards as  forwards.11 For example, for the palindromic sequence  5¹AACGTT 3’, its complementary strand would be exactly the  same in reverse when read from 3’ to 5’. When not attached  to their complementary strands, palindromic sequences have  a tendency to fold back on themselves to form hairpin loops.

 Writer’s comment:

So because it was different from what I would expect from a palindrome in everyday English and I only found one paper and not very much in the textbook I didn’t know it was very widely used phrase to call something a palindrome in DNA. I thought it required a little bit more explanation.