How to Use unicellular in a Sentence

unicellular

adjective
  • Many species are unicellular and lack advanced structures such as stems, leaves, and petals.
    — Amy Nordrum, IEEE Spectrum, 30 May 2018
  • Red tides are caused by a type of unicellular algae known as a dinoflagellate.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 14 Aug. 2018
  • Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.
    — Aric Jenkins, Fortune, 9 Jan. 2020
  • They can be found in plants, unicellular organisms, and inside neurons.
    — Andrea Morris, Forbes, 4 Nov. 2021
  • After 30 days, the algae in the middle were still unicellular.
    — Veronique Greenwood, WIRED, 11 Aug. 2024
  • Cells in multicellular bodies had to give up much of the freedom of the unicellular lifestyle.
    — Athena Aktipis, Slate Magazine, 20 Apr. 2017
  • The peculiar thing is that many of the genes identified in these oceanic creatures are also found in the unicellular species that preceded them.
    — Quanta Magazine, 8 Oct. 2025
  • And even today, there are far more unicellular organisms than multicellular ones on the planet.
    — Quanta Magazine, 22 Sep. 2021
  • That legacy echoes in our every cell, yoking our fates to the vast unicellular realm, where creatures such as protozoans navigate threats, seek succor and sense their way from life to death.
    — Claire L. Evans, Quanta Magazine, 30 July 2025
  • It’s often implied that the big deal in the origin of complex animals like us, known as metazoans, was the switch from unicellular to multicellular life.
    — Quanta Magazine, 8 Oct. 2025
  • 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
  • There are lots of other things in between them — things that branched off the lineage leading to plants and things that branched off the lineage leading to animals — that are mostly unicellular organisms.
    — Janna Levin, Quanta Magazine, 24 Oct. 2024
  • But the fact that these physical pressures forced a unicellular creature into an alternate way of life that was hard to reverse feels quite powerful, Simpson said.
    — Veronique Greenwood, WIRED, 11 Aug. 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • And the genomes of these organisms expanded considerably relative to unicellular organisms, even if the number of protein-coding genes did not.
    — Quanta Magazine, 8 Oct. 2025
  • 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
  • The gulf between unicellular and multicellular life seems almost unbridgeable.
    — Elizabeth Pennisi, Science | AAAS, 28 June 2018
  • Yeasts are unicellular, while molds and macrofungi take the form of mycelia, networks of threadlike membranes, each a single cell thick, that can infest a rotting orange, infiltrate acres of woodland or fuse together to make a mushroom.
    — Kenneth Miller, Discover Magazine, 30 May 2013
  • In its half-century of existence the Bion program has sent everything from seedlings, unicellular organisms, and plants to Rhesus monkeys, insects, rats, and fish into space.
    — Perrin Ireland, Discover Magazine, 28 Apr. 2013
  • But how could habituation happen in unicellular organisms without neurons?
    — Katia Moskvitch, WIRED, 14 July 2018
  • 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
  • To uncover this, a new analytical method was designed to compare gene expression profiles across diverse animal lineages and unicellular organisms.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 25 May 2026
  • Ciliates might sound like an unconventional focus for a cognitive scientist, but the study of memory in these unicellular creatures dates back to the early 20th century.
    — Claire L. Evans, Quanta Magazine, 30 July 2025
  • This would mean that the transition from unicellular to multicellular life was not a leap requiring entirely new genes but rather an evolutionary refinement of existing genetic mechanisms.
    — Scott Travers, Forbes, 11 Dec. 2024
  • How did life make this spectacular leap from unicellular simplicity to multicellular complexity?
    — Quanta Magazine, 29 July 2014
  • Galdieria extract blue is a specific shade made from the unicellular red algae Galdieria sulphuraria, which, realistically, makes Blue 2 sound appetizing.
    — Neal Rubin, Freep.com, 9 Aug. 2025
  • 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
  • Moeller primarily studies protists, a broad category of unicellular microorganisms like amoebas and paramecia that don’t fit within the familiar macroscopic categories of animals, plants and fungi.
    — Quanta Magazine, 19 Dec. 2022
  • Secondary endosymbiosis, on the other hand, refers to the internalization of a unicellular organism that already possesses organelles formed through primary endosymbiosis.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 June 2026

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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