How to Use multicellular in a Sentence

multicellular

adjective
Definition of multicellularnext
  • By gaining a foothold on land, Tortotubus helped to pave the way for multicellular life to emerge from the oceans.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 2 Mar. 2016
  • From its skin, fur or bark right down to its genome, any multicellular creature is an amalgam of other life-forms.
    — New York Times, 2 Dec. 2020
  • The research also might shed new light on how multicellular organisms arose in the first place.
    — Erin Blakemore Washington Post, Star Tribune, 22 Apr. 2021
  • These multicellular organisms lack the cell walls in plants and can produce sperm.
    — Shi En Kim, Smithsonian Magazine, 28 July 2021
  • Normally the cells obey a covenant, established by trial and error more than 600 million years ago, in the first forms of multicellular life.
    — Jeffrey P. Townsend, Scientific American, 1 Apr. 2018
  • In the multicellular yeast, the division of labor was more subtle.
    — Sarah Fecht, Scientific American, 16 Jan. 2012
  • Kaz wants her relationship with Toby to move faster, which right now is going about the same speed as the formation of multicellular life on Earth.
    — Charlotte Walsh, Vulture, 10 July 2021
  • And then, for reasons not understood, complex multicellular life appeared, plants and then animals, in the sea and then on the land, covering the earth and filling the seas over the course of 500 million years.
    — Michael Nesset, Star Tribune, 25 Nov. 2020
  • Researchers traced genes found in humans back to some of the earliest multicellular animals to roam Earth.
    — Tim Childers, Popular Mechanics, 19 Mar. 2021
  • Experts assumed, though, that this skill was unique to multicellular organisms, which had bodies made of many cells for which other cells could die.
    — Quanta Magazine, 6 Mar. 2024
  • Known as the Sponge Capital of the World, the area’s major commodity is the super-absorbent multicellular organism that’s found on the ocean floor.
    — Tara Massouleh McCay, Southern Living, 5 July 2024
  • During this time, a large amount of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans allowed for the first multicellular, oxygen-using organisms to arise from the sea.
    — Tara Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 May 2024
  • Yet running beneath the surface there has been a core rate of cancer, the legacy of being multicellular creatures in an imperfect world.
    — George Johnson, Discover Magazine, 30 July 2013
  • Even the greatest Mars enthusiasts are reluctant to say that the Red Planet was ever able to cook up complex, multicellular life forms.
    — Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 11 Oct. 2022
  • Could one of these multicellular creatures and its offspring reside within Landry?
    — Claire Panosian Dunavan, Discover Magazine, 19 July 2018
  • Increasing their body length by as much as 10% an hour, they're thought to be the Earth's fastest-growing multicellular animal, according to the Australian Museum.
    — Amanda Lee Myers, USA TODAY, 10 Feb. 2023
  • Each of these multicellular creatures started as a single cell that divided countless times to produce its body.
    — Quanta Magazine, 2 May 2024
  • Understanding the yeast may offer up one more clue in the search to fully understand multicellular evolution.
    — Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics, 13 May 2023
  • But the authors note that the onset of multicellular life some 550 million years ago does roughly correlate with environmental upheaval here on Earth.
    — Bruce Dorminey, Forbes, 18 Mar. 2021
  • An embryo is one of the earliest stages of development of a multicellular organism.
    — Annalisa Merelli, STAT, 22 Feb. 2024
  • Placozoans, the microscopic multicellular creatures that seem to be among the simplest in the animal kingdom, move and react to their surroundings.
    — Quanta Magazine, 18 May 2021
  • The exhibit pays homage to the mushroom, the most intelligent of simple multicellular organisms.
    — Steven Vargas, Los Angeles Times, 16 Aug. 2023
  • Only one other multicellular organism is known to be able to exist without it — the parasitic mistletoe.
    — Megan Molteni, STAT, 23 July 2022
  • About 1m species have been described, more than twice as many as all other multicellular animal species, terrestrial and marine, put together.
    — The Economist, 8 Aug. 2020
  • Almost all multicellular organisms have systems for detecting night and day, including humans, who have light receptors that tell our bodies to turn on and off the hormone melatonin.
    — Nara Schoenberg, Chicago Tribune, 12 Dec. 2022
  • The small multicellular creatures pump water through their bodies to catch and feed on phytoplankton, poop particles, and other bacteria.
    — Joshua Hawkins, BGR, 28 Nov. 2021
  • The appearance of multicellular organisms was a key evolutionary advance for life on Earth.
    — Byelizabeth Pennisi, science.org, 18 Oct. 2022
  • Although some of Earth’s first organisms lacked now-common features like heads, arms, and legs, researchers have traced back genes found in today’s animals—including humans—to some of the oldest complex multicellular creatures.
    — Tim Childers, Popular Mechanics, 19 Mar. 2021
  • But even much more complex multicellular species lay their eggs or fertilize them in the water, creating opportunities for DNA to be transferred into their lineages.
    — Jake Buehler, Quanta Magazine, 30 Mar. 2023
  • This suggested that if there were already multicellular organisms when Snowball Earth occurred—or at least organisms with the ability to take on multicellular forms—the thicker fluid could have given them a reason to get bigger.
    — Veronique Greenwood, WIRED, 11 Aug. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'multicellular.' 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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