scaffold

1. (metalworking) An accumulation of adherent, partly fused material forming a shelf or dome-shaped obstruction above the tuyeres in a blast furnace.

2. (sciences) A structure that provides support for some other material.Examples: "[T]he inventors of the present invention have found that the above-described recombinant gelatin contained in the scaffold for vascular endothelial cell migration according to the present invention markedly promotes migration of vascular endothelial cells. Therefore, use of the scaffold for vascular endothelial cell migration according to the present invention makes it possible to ensure that vascular endothelial cells migrate to a predetermined site to newly form blood vessels."; "[…] Munoz et al. first proposed the following scaffold filling problem (on multichromosomal genomes with no gene repetition) as follows[…]. Given a complete (permutation) genome R and an incomplete scaffold S, fill the missing genes in R – S into S to have S′ such that the genomic distance […] between R and S′ is minimized. It was shown that this problem can be solved in polynomial time."