primitive cell

noun

Crystallography.

1. a unit cell containing no points of the lattice except at the corners of the cell.

Word History and Origins

Origin of primitive cell¹

First recorded in 1930–35

Example Sentences

They found that when hot hydrogen-rich fluids were mixed with carbon dioxide-rich water in the presence of iron-based minerals that were present on the early Earth it created the types of molecules needed to form primitive cell membranes.

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As it began to divide, cancer genes took over and the single primitive cell barreled forward into a massive tumor.

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Jack Szostak and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston have taken a different approach, enclosing RNA molecules in fatty-acid vesicles as an early step towards the creation of a primitive cell.

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It is the life-basis, the primitive cell of the aggregate of cities and bodies politic.

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We think that a primitive cell has to have two parts.

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