Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of the homologous segments that compose the body of certain animals, such as earthworms and lobsters, and are arranged in a longitudinal series.
  • noun A segmental mass of mesoderm in the vertebrate embryo, occurring in pairs along the notochord and developing into muscles and vertebrae.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An actual somatome; any one morphological segment of an articulated body, such a body being viewed as composed of a longitudinal series of somites; an arthromere or metamere of an articulate invertebrate or a diarthromere of a vertebrate; such a segment considered with or without the appendages it may possess; in the latter restricted sense, a metamere minus its appendages, or a segment of the soma or trunk without the limbs it may bear.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Anat. & Zoöl.) One of the actual or ideal serial segments of which an animal, esp. an articulate or vertebrate, is composed; somatome; metamere.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun embryology One of the paired masses of mesoderm distributed along the sides of the neural tube that will eventually become dermis, skeletal muscle, or vertebrae.
  • noun anatomy A metamere, one of a series of segments, arranged longitudinally, of which some animals are composed.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun one of a series of similar body segments into which some animals are divided longitudinally

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Greek sōma, body; see soma + –ite.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

soma +‎ -ite

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Examples

  • The somite pattern in the fish embryo is much less complex than the segment pattern of the Drosophila larva.

    Nobel Lecture The Identification Of Genes Controlling Development In Flies And Fishes 1995

  • The genes affecting somite subdivision by the horizontal myoseptum might represent members of these signalling processes (Figure 5G).

    Nobel Lecture The Identification Of Genes Controlling Development In Flies And Fishes 1995

  • The first segment, which is almost half-way down in the embryonic shield of the amniote, is the foremost of all; from this first somite is formed the first cervical vertebra with its muscles and skeletal parts.

    The Evolution of Man — Volume 1 Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel 1876

  • These two body segments are connected with a small waist called the pedicle or the pregenital somite.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

  • Pdx-1 is expressed in the mouse primitive gut as early as the 13 somite stage (E8. 5), about a day before endocrine gene expression and 1.5 days before the first morphologic evidence of pancreas organogenesis.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Ji-Hyeon Lee et al. 2010

  • In addition we have also demonstrated the physiological PNS potential of 8 weeks old NPs 7 days after implantation of the cells into the developing neural tube (NT) of 18-23 somite chick embryos in ovo.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Moran Valensi-Kurtz et al. 2010

  • The current study was carried out to test whether any of the five major signaling pathways are regulated by tbx16 during two specific stages of mesoderm development: primitive red blood cell formation in the intermediate mesoderm and somite formation in the tail paraxial mesoderm.

    BioMed Central - Latest articles 2010

  • These two body segments are connected with a small waist called the pedicle or the pregenital somite.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2010

  • When the wave of gene expression encounters a set of responsive cells, those cells are specified to become the next somite.

    PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010

  • Pdx-1 is expressed in the mouse primitive gut as early as the 13 somite stage (E8. 5), about a day before endocrine gene expression and 1.5 days before the first morphologic evidence of pancreas organogenesis.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles 2010

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