Mosaicism

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The condition in which more than one genetically distinct population of cells coexist within one individual. countable, uncountable

    "Some but not all of the cells that made up the fetus […] had an extra chromosome on the twentieth pair. A mosaicism, it was called."

  2. 2
    the condition in which an organism has two or more cell populations that differ in genetic makeup wordnet

Example

More examples

"Some but not all of the cells that made up the fetus […] had an extra chromosome on the twentieth pair. A mosaicism, it was called."

Etymology

From mosaic + -ism.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.