metazoan
Americannoun
adjective
noun
adjective
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Any of the animals belonging to the subkingdom Metazoa, having a body made up of differentiated cells arranged in tissues and organs. All multicellular animals besides sponges are metazoans.
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A multicellular animal. No longer in scientific use.
Other Word Forms
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Etymology
Origin of metazoan
C19: from New Latin Metazoa; see meta- , -zoa
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Bars indicate the presence or relative expansions of selected gene families in all basal metazoan lineages from the inferred urmetazoan ancestor.
From Nature ● May 20, 2014
These studies demonstrated that large fractions of metazoan genomes are transcribed, and they also catalogued individual elements of transcriptomes, including transcription start sites3, polyadenylation sites4, 5, exons and introns6.
From Nature ● Mar. 15, 2014
This overlap of expressional responses by gene families across phyla suggests a conserved metazoan stress response involving enhanced metabolism and the suppression of genes involved in reproduction.
From Nature ● Mar. 15, 2014
Our analysis reveals a transcriptome of high complexity that is expressed in discrete, tissue- and condition-specific messenger RNA and lncRNA transcript isoforms that span most of the genome and provides valuable insights into metazoan biology.
From Nature ● Mar. 15, 2014
"The existence of immortal metazoan organisms is conceivable," but their capacity for existence is influenced by conditions of the external world; this renders necessary the process of adaptation.
From The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays by Joly, John
It focuses specifically on benthic metazoans — multicellular animals living at the bottom of the ocean.
From Scientific American ● May 26, 2023
But many parasitologists like Wood focus on multicellular metazoans: animals that encompass hundreds of thousands of species, including up to 300,000 different types of worms that parasitize vertebrates alone.
From Scientific American ● May 18, 2022
Some of these genes lack identifiable orthologues in other metazoans but do resemble microbial sequences and domain types.
From Nature ● Nov. 17, 2015
The phylogenetic tree of metazoans, or animals, branches into parazoans with no tissues and eumetazoans with specialized tissues.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2015
Later, when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits, and then we will see eukaryotic thought, metazoans of thought, huge interliving coral shoals of thought.
From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
