How to Use heritable in a Sentence

heritable

adjective
Definition of heritablenext
Synonyms for heritablenext
  • The other is the color of a baby due to be born, the Black-No-More process not being heritable.
    — Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 18 Jan. 2018
  • The ability to identify the right things to be afraid of is a heritable trait in some species.
    — Rebecca Giggs, The Atlantic, 5 Oct. 2020
  • It was found to be highly heritable in a study led by a team of German researchers in 2006.
    — Kate Samuelson, Time, 14 July 2017
  • Since the first autism twin study in 1977, several teams have compared autism rates in twins and shown that autism is highly heritable.
    — Nicholette Zeliadt, Washington Post, 30 June 2017
  • Literacy, of course, isn’t a heritable trait, the way that eye color is.
    — Jack Schneider, The Atlantic, 22 Jan. 2018
  • The heritable nature of schizophrenia has been known for about a century.
    — Isabella Cueto, STAT, 16 Aug. 2023
  • Mostly, this is caused by aging and lifestyle, but in some cases the disease is heritable.
    — Oscar Schwartz, Washington Post, 23 Nov. 2020
  • Catchability was a heritable trait—in other words, the researchers were able to breed bass that were harder to catch.
    — Hal Schramm, Outdoor Life, 12 Sep. 2020
  • Editing the genes of embryos is more contentious than altering the genes of adults because those changes are heritable and can be passed on to future generations.
    — Preetika Rana, WSJ, 21 Feb. 2019
  • Performance on the other two tasks was much less heritable, which MacLean says tells us that not all of these traits have an equally strong genetic component.
    — Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 June 2021
  • But in the case of many conditions with a heritable aspect, the role of genetics is still too muddy to inform reputable decisions.
    — WIRED, 25 Aug. 2022
  • Sporns said the researchers are trying to answer questions such as whether there are heritable differences in the rich club structure and whether these structures change over a person’s lifetime.
    — Quanta Magazine, 24 Oct. 2013
  • Dr. Zaidi and his colleagues also demonstrated that nose shape is a heritable trait.
    — Steph Yin, New York Times, 16 Mar. 2017
  • Success in the pointing task as well as a puppy’s tendency to look at a human face during the 30-second script were highly heritable, according to the paper.
    — Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 June 2021
  • This effect is what scientists refer to epigenetics - the study of how heritable traits and the environment affect what genes get turned on and off.
    — Gabriel A. Silva, Forbes, 5 Apr. 2021
  • The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome.
    — Diana Gitig, Ars Technica, 29 Oct. 2022
  • Intelligence is heritable, and for a long time researchers assumed that people with high IQ scores would have kids that also scored above average.
    — Rory Smith, CNN, 13 June 2018
  • The team’s findings confirmed that some aspects of canine behavior do seem quite heritable—and sometimes even echo kennel-club dogma.
    — Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 28 Apr. 2022
  • But genome editing could also alter germ lines—eggs, sperm, or embryos—to create heritable changes that can be passed to future generations.
    — Jennifer A. Doudna, The Atlantic, 12 Sep. 2022
  • Fears of blood, injury and injections, on the other hand, could be up to 71 percent heritable, driven more by genetics and less by experience.
    — Agata Boxe, Discover Magazine, 9 Sep. 2019
  • Studies of character displacement should also show that the species under study truly compete, and that the differences among species, such as smaller beaks, are a heritable trait.
    — Emily Singer, WIRED, 18 Mar. 2014
  • Others, including many with heritable conditions like deafness and dwarfism, long to have children who share their features and their experience of the world.
    — Los Angeles Times, 30 Sep. 2021
  • Growth is highly heritable and easy to measure, so traditional breeding works well.
    — Erik Stokstad, Science | AAAS, 19 Nov. 2020
  • One reason obstructive sleep apnea can run in families is because the shape of your airway or lower jaw, both of which are risk factors for sleep apnea, are heritable traits, physicians say4.
    — Beth Krietsch, SELF, 28 Oct. 2021
  • This finding suggests that the antibodies are heritable risk factors for autism.
    — Nicholette Zeliadt, Washington Post, 2 Apr. 2018
  • The other strains are less strongly heritable, meaning family history is a useful part of a diagnosis, but not more than that.
    — The Economist, 11 Jan. 2018
  • Studies cited by Tashiro, for example, conclude that awkwardness in girls is just 39 percent heritable (for boys the number is 52 percent).
    — Washington Post, 1 July 2021
  • So far, researchers have identified at least 12 heritable genes or mutations that can be passed down within families that increase the risk of kidney cancer.
    — Markham Heid, Time, 13 Dec. 2022
  • For one thing, facial features are considered to be highly heritable.
    — Connor Lynch, Discover Magazine, 2 Feb. 2022
  • These night owls may have a common form of insomnia called delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), which studies have suggested is at least partly heritable.
    — Veronique Greenwood, Scientific American, 7 July 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'heritable.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: