How to Use protist in a Sentence

protist

noun
  • 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
  • Looking like a puffy white star studded with little pearls, this is the shell of an amoeboid protist called a foraminifera, or foram.
    — Discover Magazine, 29 June 2010
  • If that didn’t prevent the irritation, the protists used their cilia to spit water at the pipette.
    — Claire L. Evans, Quanta Magazine, 30 July 2025
  • The scientific name is derived from the twisting motion that helps the protist swim.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 23 May 2018
  • 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
  • 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
  • But many other simple organisms—fungi, protists, and bacteria included—can do much the same.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 31 Mar. 2026
  • 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
  • Instead, malaria is a protist, an organism that in some cases dramatically changes form depending on its life cycle.
    — oregonlive, 25 Jan. 2020
  • The remainder is distributed among fungi, archaea, protists, animals and viruses, in that order.
    — The Economist, 24 May 2018
  • 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
  • Mavericks are an ancient and fragmented class of jumping genes prevalent in the genomes of protists, fungi and animals, including humans.
    — Saugat Bolakhe, Quanta Magazine, 3 Aug. 2023
  • 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
  • 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
  • Some marine protists with gargantuan breeding populations had hundreds or thousands of introners.
    — Jake Buehler, Quanta Magazine, 30 Mar. 2023
  • This provided the perfect conditions for a thriving microbial community of protists, bacteria, viruses and even some larger creatures such as snails and worms.
    — Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American, 9 Aug. 2023
  • 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
  • All eukaryotic cells — animal, plant, fungus or protist — have a nucleus that encloses and protects DNA.
    — Quanta Magazine, 28 Oct. 2024
  • Yana Eglit is a Dalhousie graduate student dedicated to discovering novel lineages of the single-cell eukaryotes called protists.
    — Quanta Magazine, 11 Dec. 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
  • In a series of experiments, Jennings repeatedly squirted an irritating red dye at some of these ciliated protists sourced from a nearby pond and observed how the organisms reacted.
    — Claire L. Evans, Quanta Magazine, 30 July 2025
  • 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
  • Over the past 50 years or so, scientists have shown that hundreds of organisms in nearly all branches of the bacterial, protist and animal kingdoms have the ability to detect and respond to this geomagnetic field.
    — Shinsuke Shimojo, Daw-An Wu, Discover Magazine, 18 Mar. 2019
  • 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
  • Stealthy, Abundant Invaders The team systematically scanned more than 3,300 genomes from across the full breadth of eukaryotic diversity — everything from sheep to sequoias to ciliate protists.
    — Jake Buehler, Quanta Magazine, 30 Mar. 2023

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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