How to Use symbiont in a Sentence

symbiont

noun
  • When Shori takes on another male symbiont, Wright punches a hole in the wall.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, The Atlantic, 1 Feb. 2022
  • So rather than teaming up with a symbiont, why not cut out the middle-man and take its chloroplasts for yourself?
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 18 Sep. 2012
  • The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient.
    — Dick Teresi, Discover Magazine, 17 June 2011
  • In other words, can humans cultivate a better terrain for their symbionts?
    — Jason Pontin, WIRED, 15 June 2018
  • When stressed by heat these symbionts start producing dangerous oxidants.
    — The Economist, 15 Mar. 2018
  • These symbionts help fight off pathogenic bacteria and fungi.
    — Sarah Everts, TIME, 16 July 2024
  • Simon says the cicada is trapped in a 17-year cycle that has forced it to make unusual adaptations like living with this symbiont.
    — Eric Niiler, Wired, 21 May 2021
  • The extreme heat has triggered coral bleaching, where stressed corals expel their colorful algae symbionts, leaving them pale and vulnerable.
    — NBC News, 16 July 2023
  • Butler suggests that the Ina-symbiont relationship might be no worse than the forms of dependency that humans already take for granted.
    — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 8 Mar. 2021
  • Bassler’s first foray into quorum sensing involved Vibrio fischeri, a symbiont that lives inside deep ocean animals.
    — Jeffrey Marlow, WIRED, 5 June 2013
  • For decades, researchers have known that mitochondria are derived from bacteria that became internal symbionts of archaeal cells, but details of how that happened have been sketchy.
    — Quanta Magazine, 9 Apr. 2019
  • Filaments of the protein actin, for example, could have stabilized contacts between the hosts and symbionts and improved the coupling of their metabolisms.
    — Quanta Magazine, 9 Apr. 2019
  • In other sap-sucking insects, symbionts serve additional functions, Moran and her colleagues discovered.
    — Elizabeth Pennisi, Science | AAAS, 14 Nov. 2019
  • This jet forces out oxygen that accumulates in the middle of the polyp (thanks to its resident symbionts, photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae).
    — Scientific American, 30 Aug. 2019
  • In early life, this tissue exposes developing immune cells to intestinal microbes, helping the body learn to distinguish between harmless symbionts and harmful pathogens.
    — Lilia Goncharova, The Conversation, 9 Mar. 2026
  • Tobin examined Mae and Osha’s blood test results and noticed that their symbionts were exactly the same, meaning they were artificially created.
    — Keisha Hatchett, TVLine, 9 July 2024
  • Skillings and other critics argue that there just isn’t enough evidence of vertical transmission of symbionts to allow for the holobiont to be a coherent evolutionary individual.
    — Quanta Magazine, 20 Nov. 2018
  • Any efforts to grow plants will necessarily lead to the introduction of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes — whether intentionally as useful symbionts or as accidental stowaways.
    — Scott E. Solomon, STAT, 22 Apr. 2026
  • Certain algae species serve as symbionts for Cassiopea jellyfish, providing the animals with nutrients harvested from sunlight by way of photosynthesis.
    — Cheryl Ames, National Geographic, 13 Feb. 2020
  • In facultative endosymbiosis, the symbiont can live independently, as in the case of nitrogen-fixing Rhizobium bacteria in the root nodules of leguminous plants.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 June 2026
  • For instance, the bacterium Carsonella ruddii, which lives as a symbiont within the guts of sap-feeding insects, has an even smaller genome than Sukunaarchaeum, at around 159,000 base pairs.
    — Jake Buehler, Quanta Magazine, 24 Nov. 2025
  • Jenkins suspected that this stabilizing mechanism might involve the organisms’ RNA because his colleagues had noticed many regions of strong similarity between host and symbiont transcripts floating around in the cytoplasm.
    — Quanta Magazine, 7 June 2021

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