Gamete
cell that fuses during fertilisation, such as a sperm or egg cell
A gamete ( GAM-eet ), reproductive cell, or sex cell, is a haploid cell that fuses with another haploid cell during fertilization in organisms that reproduce sexually. The name gamete was introduced by the German cytologist Eduard Strasburger in 1878.
The type of gamete an organism produces determines its sex and sets the basis for the sexual roles and sexual selection. Female gametes are called ova or egg cells, and male gametes are called sperm. In the majority of species, the gametes are of different sizes, a condition known as anisogamy or heterogamy that applies to humans and other mammals. For example, the human ovum has approximately 100,000 times the volume of a single human sperm cell. Sperm cells are motile due to the presence of a tail-shaped structure, the flagellum, that provides propulsion. In contrast, each egg cell or ovum is comparably large and non-motile. Gametes of both mating individuals can also be the same size and shape, a condition known as isogamy.
Oogenesis, the process of female gamete formation in animals, involves meiosis (including meiotic recombination) of a diploid primary oocyte to produce a haploid ovum.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gamete” is cell that fuses during fertilisation, such as a sperm or egg cell. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gamete, cell and fuses, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q211050. The Library of Congress control number is sh85052973. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1878.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gamete” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.