How to Use unicellular in a Sentence
unicellular
adjective-
Red tides are caused by a type of unicellular algae known as a dinoflagellate.
—David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 14 Aug. 2018
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Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.
—Aric Jenkins, Fortune, 9 Jan. 2020
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Cells in multicellular bodies had to give up much of the freedom of the unicellular lifestyle.
—Athena Aktipis, Slate Magazine, 20 Apr. 2017
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The pre-Cambrian is the moment in the history of life when unicellular organisms were ready to take the next step and develop into complex life forms.
—Ross Andersen, The Atlantic, 25 Aug. 2016
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They can be found in plants, unicellular organisms, and inside neurons.
—Andrea Morris, Forbes, 4 Nov. 2021
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The creatures are widely considered to be the closest living unicellular relatives of animals: a sister twig on the tree of life that grew up alongside ours.
—Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 28 Sep. 2022
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Single cells started to band together, and a world of formless, unicellular life was on course to evolve into the riot of shapes and functions of multicellular life today, from ants to pear trees to people.
—Katie Langin, Science | AAAS, 29 June 2018
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The beetle is so tiny that it is dwarfed by some unicellular organisms, which are usually microscopic.
—Lauren M. Johnson, CNN, 25 Oct. 2019
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And even today, there are far more unicellular organisms than multicellular ones on the planet.
—Quanta Magazine, 22 Sep. 2021
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Jennings, too, as early as the turn of the 20th century, sensed and believed that the behavioral workings of animals were often elaborations on systems already in place in unicellular life.
—Jennifer Frazer, Scientific American, 28 May 2021
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Biophysically, this suggests that a unicellular organism can evolve a way to maintain the physical integrity of a larger size.
—Quanta Magazine, 22 Sep. 2021
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His results showed that the region seethed with mats of photosynthesizing, unicellular life forms long before the Cambrian explosion.
—Peter Byrne, Quanta Magazine, 24 Apr. 2014
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Last year, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology reported that unicellular yeasts in their laboratory evolved a huge multicellular form in just two years.
—Carrie Arnold, Quanta Magazine, 2 Nov. 2022
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Schwartzman and van Gestel both believe that a capacity for multicellularity evolved early in life’s history and is shared with bacteria’s ancient cousins, the archaea, which also seem unicellular.
—Carrie Arnold, Quanta Magazine, 2 Nov. 2022
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The gulf between unicellular and multicellular life seems almost unbridgeable.
—Elizabeth Pennisi, Science | AAAS, 28 June 2018
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In a 1998 article in the Annual Review of Microbiology, Shapiro argued that bacteria aren’t unicellular loners.
—Carrie Arnold, Quanta Magazine, 2 Nov. 2022
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But how could habituation happen in unicellular organisms without neurons?
—Katia Moskvitch, WIRED, 14 July 2018
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How did life make this spectacular leap from unicellular simplicity to multicellular complexity?
—Quanta Magazine, 29 July 2014
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'unicellular.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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