How to Use protist in a Sentence

protist

noun
Definition of protistnext
  • The new species doesn't fit with any other known groups of protists.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 23 May 2018
  • Are there certain protists that are found in dogs in a specific area?
    — Andy Newman, New York Times, 7 Apr. 2017
  • The protist also oozes enzymes that burst and destroy human cells and nerves.
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 26 July 2019
  • The scientific name is derived from the twisting motion that helps the protist swim.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 23 May 2018
  • Viral genes were detected alongside 51 percent of protist cells from the gulf and 35 percent from the sea.
    — Jennifer Frazer, Scientific American, 11 Nov. 2020
  • The ones that Leidy saw are protists—microbes that have more in common with us than with bacteria, but that still consist of a single, tiny cell.
    — Ed Yong, The Atlantic, 16 Oct. 2017
  • Dicty, the prodigy protist, not only solved this maze but also managed to use its self-generating gradient skills to find a shortcut.
    — Emily Willingham, Scientific American, 28 Aug. 2020
  • The organism propels itself with a whip-like tail, called a flagella, and uses unusual harpoon-like structures to stun and consume other protists.
    — Sean Greene, latimes.com, 23 May 2018
  • Any genetic material that differed from a protist’s, the team reasoned, was probably the signature of something the microbes had eaten.
    — Katherine J. Wu New York Times, Star Tribune, 24 Sep. 2020
  • Their emergence more than one billion years ago was a foundational event in the development of eukaryotes, which include plants, animals, protists and fungi.
    — Quanta Magazine, 20 June 2013
  • The remainder is distributed among fungi, archaea, protists, animals and viruses, in that order.
    — The Economist, 24 May 2018
  • As an undergraduate, her textbooks taught there were five kingdoms of life: plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and protists.
    — Tony Briscoe, chicagotribune.com, 5 July 2019
  • Instead, malaria is a protist, an organism that in some cases dramatically changes form depending on its life cycle.
    — oregonlive, 25 Jan. 2020
  • In his first book are jellyfish that look like flowers, protists that resemble Fabergé eggs, presented like crown jewels on black velvet, the seeming cosmic vastness of the images belying their actual, microscopic size.
    — The New York Review of Books, 16 Dec. 2018
  • Ernst Haeckel’s intention was to make the natural forms of elusive organisms accessible to artists, and supply them with a new visual vocabulary of protists, mollusks, trilobites, siphonophores, fungi, and echinoderms.
    — The New York Review of Books, 16 Dec. 2018
  • Yana Eglit is a Dalhousie graduate student dedicated to discovering novel lineages of the single-cell eukaryotes called protists.
    — Quanta Magazine, 11 Dec. 2018
  • Until fairly recently, myxosporeans were considered to be protists, offshoots of the eukaryotic line that are neither plants, animals nor fungi.
    — Quanta Magazine, 19 Aug. 2019
  • This allowed him to accidentally discover microorganisms like bacteria and protists, beginning in the 1670s.
    — Doug Main, The Atlantic, 7 Apr. 2018
  • This bacterial shag carpet also proved a welcoming home to a variety of other bacteria (although strangely, virtually no archaea), protists, and animals.
    — Scientific American Blog Network, 21 Apr. 2017

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