reinitiation

Reinitiation is the act of initiating something again after an interruption. It can refer to restarting a process, procedure, device, or line of inquiry, often after a pause or a failure. Reinitiation may involve returning to the original starting conditions (reset) or adopting new starting parameters.

General and technical use: In engineering and information technology, reinitialization repeatedly means resetting stateful components to their initial values, for example during software error handling, hardware resets, or system boot procedures. It is distinct from a full shutdown, although the result can be similar; reinitialization may be used to recover a known good state without replacing the entire system.

Biology and medicine: In molecular biology, reinitiation describes mechanisms by which cellular machines restart a process after a previous initiation event. Transcription reinitiation occurs when RNA polymerase resumes transcription at a promoter after terminating a previous round. Translation reinitiation occurs when ribosomes re-associate with an mRNA to begin another round of translation, often after terminating an upstream open reading frame. In clinical practice, reinitiation denotes restarting a therapeutic regimen after a pause, such as resuming a drug after interruption, under medical guidance.

Other domains: In project management and experimental science, reinitiation can refer to restarting experiments, trials, or workflows after delays or failures.

See also: restart, reset, reboot.