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I have the two concept antibody and metal ion and I would like to pair them with conjugated.

In the first case I would use antibody-conjugated. What's the correct typesetting in the second case?

Is it metal ion-conjugated or metal-ion-conjugated?

NVZ
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Nisba
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    I'd use antibody-conjugated only when I placed it before a noun. But if the noun is antibody conjugated, no hyphen. Either way, I'd hyphenate a metal-ion conjugated thing. – Yosef Baskin Apr 14 '22 at 13:11
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    You've got to disambiguate where necessary, and you've got dashes as well as hyphens to help with this (according to Wikipedia and various style guides). Deciding where it's necessary is the hard bit. // Here, it's tempting to use square brackets: [metal ion] [conjugated] ... which sadly no style guide allows for this purpose. Now hyphens imply connection in the first instance, so I'd avoid metal ion-conjugated. If you wish to preserve the connector before connected in prenominal usage, you could add a dash as a 'weaker hyphen': metal-ion–conjugated (using the en- or em-dash). – Edwin Ashworth Apr 14 '22 at 13:57
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    @EdwinAshworth yes, thank you! – Nisba Apr 16 '22 at 10:22

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