(n.) One from whom a person is descended, whether on the father's or mother's side, at any distance of time; a progenitor; a fore father.
(n.) An earlier type; a progenitor; as, this fossil animal is regarded as the ancestor of the horse.
(n.) One from whom an estate has descended; -- the correlative of heir.
Example Sentences:
(1) The high frequency of increased PCV number in San, S.A. Negroes and American Negroes is in keeping with the view that the Khoisan peoples (here represented by the San), the Southern African Negroes and the African ancestors of American Blacks sprang from a common proto-negriform stock.
(2) The 500-bp element arose by duplication of one half of a 180-bp ancestor and insertion of a foreign segment between the two duplicated parts followed by amplification.
(3) The five offspring are ancestors of all known carriers.
(4) They are related as fourth cousins once-removed and fifth cousins in multiple ways through the six nearest common ancestors of all four parents.
(5) An analysis of 54 protein sequences from humans and rodents (mice or rats), with the chicken as an outgroup, indicates that, from the common ancestor of primates and rodents, 35 of the proteins have evolved faster in the lineage to mouse or rat (rodent lineage) whereas only 12 proteins have evolved faster in the lineage to humans (human lineage).
(6) Writing in the journal Nature , the researchers describe how our ancestors lost another piece of DNA that gives rise to both facial whiskers and sensitive spines on the tip of the penis, both of which are found in chimpanzees and other non-human primates.
(7) With the use of the chimpanzee and human sequences to calibrate the rate of mtDNA evolution, the age of the common human mtDNA ancestor is placed between 166,000 and 249,000 years.
(8) The functional and phyletic significance of this material reveals a complex pattern of behavioral and phyletic diversity among large-bodied catarrhines in Europe and suggests that this diversity evolved in situ from circum-Mediterranean middle Miocene ancestors.
(9) Regressions of descendant net revenue on ancestor net revenue were predominantly negative but generally were not significant.
(10) This finding also suggests that the Hex, Mut, and PMS systems evolved from a common ancestor and that functionally similar mismatch repair systems could be widespread among procaryotic as well as eucaryotic organisms.
(11) -In several cases, second or third generation descendents of 3T3 cells were observed to repeat track patterns of their ancestor cell.
(12) Within the family, EIAV, HTLV-III, and visna appear to be equally divergent from a common evolutionary ancestor.
(13) We deduce that in ubiquitin genes, concerted evolution involves both unequal crossover and gene conversion, and that the average time since two repeated units within the polyubiquitin locus most recently shared a common ancestor is approximately 38 million years (Myr) in mammals, but perhaps only 11 Myr in Drosophila.
(14) During this evolution the interior of the core blocks evolved as a homogeneous repetitive structure, while ancestor repeat units remained as sequence relicts in the terminal parts.
(15) The divergence of a common ancestor protein into PF4 and gamma IP-10 may have accompanied the development of sophisticated immune and coagulation systems in vertebrates.
(16) Analysis of different Mus subspecies indicates that TLev1 integrated into a common ancestor of the species Mus musculus.
(17) In order to assess the possibility that such proteins may have arisen through processes of divergent evolution from a common ancestor, a graphical presentation is given which correlates the pattern of allowed single base substitutions defined by the genetic code with the associated changes in the structural properties of the encoded amino acids.
(18) In an attempt to reconstruct the universal ancestor of all present-day tubulin genes the intron positions in 38 different alpha- and beta-tubulin genes from plants, animals, fungi and protozoa were compared.
(19) This raises the possibility of two lines of descent from a common ancestor.
(20) Phylogenetic analysis indicates that these four main virus groups might have diverged from a common ancestor at about the same time, long before the spread of AIDS in humans.
Ancestress
Definition:
(n.) A female ancestor.
Example Sentences:
(1) We describe the neuropsychological and behavioral profiles of 48 critical members of a previously reported Sardinian pedigree [Filippi et al., 1991], in which the fully manifested Martin-Bell syndrome (MBS), observed among males of the latest generations, is clearly the result of step-wise mutational events occurred repeatedly along the X-chromosome pathway linking all of them to a common ancestress, who must have been heterozygous for a fragile X (FRAX) premutation.
(2) This premutation appears to have turned into a true FRAX-mutation at least 9 times during the gametogenesis of the ancestress' X-related descendants of whom four are males.
(3) All the MBS patients and the 15 obligate heterozygous women present in the pedigree could be traced back through their X-chromosome lineage to the same ancestress, who must have been heterozygous for a silent premutation at the FRAX-locus.