How to Use zygote in a Sentence

zygote

noun
  • Breaking so many contacts between cells may seem ruinous for a zygote floating in the womb.
    — Clare Watson, Quanta Magazine, 27 Feb. 2026
  • Cell mitosis takes place over three to five days, as your zygote makes its way through your fallopian tube.
    — ​wendy Wisner, Parents, 18 Nov. 2023
  • What actually happens when that sperm and ovum get together to make a zygote?
    — Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 13 Feb. 2012
  • With this defining feature, the zygote becomes a blastocyst, ready to embed itself in the lining of the uterus.
    — Clare Watson, Quanta Magazine, 27 Feb. 2026
  • There's not much time before the zygotes, fertilized single cells, start multiplying.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 23 Apr. 2018
  • So in the process of, of cellular division and the creation of a zygote, mothers pass on their mitochondria, not fathers.
    — Steven Strogatz, Quanta Magazine, 27 July 2022
  • Each zygote's growth is optimized and their every need tended to by the pod; parents can even choose to feed them or soothe them remotely from an app, like Tamagotchis.
    — Leah Greenblatt, EW.com, 20 Jan. 2023
  • My mother-in-law nodded wisely, noting that this was a good sign, that nausea meant my body was chock-full of all the hormones necessary to keep that little zygote safe and sound.
    — Jenn Morson, Redbook, 5 Sep. 2017
  • The result was one-cell embryos, known as zygotes, with a defective gene responsible for the heart condition from the man along with a healthy copy of the gene from the woman.
    — Lynne Terry, OregonLive.com, 2 Aug. 2017
  • Those isolated RNAs are then injected into a zygote.
    — Ivan Amato, Quanta Magazine, 22 Dec. 2025
  • The researchers imaged them once a minute, much faster than scientists ever had before, starting at the stage just before the zygotes would normally adhere to the womb wall.
    — Clare Watson, Quanta Magazine, 27 Feb. 2026
  • When a zygote, embryo or fetus becomes a human being is far from an objective determination within or across any religions.
    — Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN, 17 July 2022
  • Then the zygote splits, creating two highly similar individuals with the same set of genetic instructions called the genome.
    — Avery Hurt, Discover Magazine, 3 Mar. 2021
  • Ectopic pregnancies are often called tubal pregnancies, but can happen anywhere, really, that a wayward zygote with a self-destructive streak lands.
    — Joanna Petrone, Longreads, 18 Aug. 2017
  • The zygote then divides, eventually forming an organism with mostly the same genetic material throughout its body.
    — Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 Apr. 2023
  • Typically during reproduction, two gametes — cells with half the number of original chromosomes — come together to create a zygote, with a full suite of genes.
    — Oliver Whang, New York Times, 12 Sep. 2022
  • At the time of its birth, the zoo explained that the turtles suffered from a condition called polycephaly, a condition that results when zygotes don't properly separate during development.
    — Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic, 21 Aug. 2017
  • The researchers found that cells separate into fetal and placental lineages earlier than anticipated — in some cases, within the first few cell divisions of the zygote.
    — Quanta Magazine, 8 Apr. 2021
  • Take, for example,the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which would give full legal rights to human zygotes from the moment of fertilization.
    — Bromleigh McCleneghan, Redbook, 6 Apr. 2017
  • If this all sounds familiar, there’s a reason for it — animal embryos develop from zygotes in much the same way, and spherical choanoflagellate colonies look uncannily like early-stage animal embryos.
    — Quanta Magazine, 29 July 2014
  • And when the researchers injected the RNAs from the sperm of the fat-eating mice into a zygote, some of the male offspring showed metabolic issues associated with a high-fat diet.
    — Ivan Amato, Quanta Magazine, 22 Dec. 2025
  • Even though each of your cells supposedly contains a replica of the DNA in the fertilized egg that began your life, mutations, copying errors and editing mistakes began modifying that code as soon as your zygote self began to divide.
    — Quanta Magazine, 21 Aug. 2014
  • In 2019, Turlier and his collaborator Jean-Léon Maître, a cell and developmental biophysicist at the Curie Institute in Paris, observed a similar fracturing process in living tissue — mouse zygotes growing in a dish.
    — Clare Watson, Quanta Magazine, 27 Feb. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'zygote.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: