Definitions

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

  • noun The nutritive substances or yolk in the cytoplasm of an ovum or other cell.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as deuteroplasma.
  • noun In embryol., secondary, nutritive plasm, or food-yolk: a term applied by the younger Van Beneden to that portion of the yolk of an egg or ovum which furnishes food for the nourishment of the embryo, but does not enter directly into its formation or germination.

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

  • noun (Biol.) The lifeless food matter in the cytoplasm of an ovum or a cell, as distinguished from the active or true protoplasm; yolk substance; yolk.

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

  • noun biology The lifeless food matter in the cytoplasm of an ovum or a cell, as distinguished from the active or true protoplasm; yolk substance.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Ancient Greek

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Examples

  • In the mammalian ova the nutritive yolk or deutoplasm is small in amount and uniformly distributed throughout the cytoplasm; such ova undergo complete division during the process of segmentation, and are therefore termed holoblastic.

    I. Embryology. 5. Segmentation of the Fertilized Ovum 1918

  • —The yolk comprises (1) the cytoplasm of the ordinary animal cell with its spongioplasm and hyaloplasm; this is frequently termed the formative yolk; (2) the nutritive yolk or deutoplasm, which consists of numerous rounded granules of fatty and albuminoid substances imbedded in the cytoplasm.

    I. Embryology. 2. The Ovum 1918

  • It may, however, continue for some time (even after the gastrulation is more or less complete) in the sense that the vegetal cell-nuclei distributed in the deutoplasm slowly increase by cleavage; as each of them is surrounded by a small quantity of protoplasm, it may afterwards appropriate a portion of the food-yelk, and thus form a real "yelk-cell" (merocyte).

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

  • The chief part of the globular mass is formed by the nuclear yelk (deutoplasm), which is evenly distributed in the active protoplasm, and consists of numbers of fine yelk-granules.

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

  • While the protoplasm in the animal section of the ovum continues briskly to divide, multiplying the nuclei, the deutoplasm in the vegetal section remains more or less undivided; it is merely consumed as food by the forming cells.

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

  • The contractions of the active protoplasm, which effect this continual cleavage of the cells, meet a greater resistance in the lower vegetal half from the passive deutoplasm than in the upper animal half.

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

  • In the yelk we must distinguish the active formative yelk (or protoplasm = first plasm) from the passive nutritive yelk (or deutoplasm = second plasm).

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

  • Hence we distinguish in the ova two chief elements -- the active formative yelk (protoplasm) and the passive food-yelk (deutoplasm, wrongly spoken of as "the yelk").

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

  • In these the contractility of the active protoplasm no longer suffices to break up the huge mass of the passive deutoplasm completely into cells; this is only possible in the upper or dorsal part, but not in the lower or ventral section.

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

  • The clear protoplasm of the mature ovum is made so turbid by the numbers of dark granules of food-yelk or deutoplasm scattered in it that it is difficult to follow the process of fecundation and the behaviour of the two nuclei during it (Chapter

    The Evolution of Man — Volume 2 Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel 1876

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