Mitosis Experiment Essay

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The aim of the experiment is to better understand the process and stages of mitosis. Prepare specimens of onion root in order to visualize all stages of mitosis, and estimate the relative length of each stage of mitosis.
In this experiment, we cut 2 onion roots tips about 1 cm long and placed it into a micro-tube with HCl. Then, the tube was placed in a water bath for 20 minutes to incubate the roots. After 20 minutes, we removed the HCl from the tube and rinsed 3 times the root tips with water. Then, we covered the root with Feulgen stain and incubated it for 12 minutes. Lastly, we removed the stain and rinsed the roots.
To prepare the root tip squash one of the roots was transferred to a microscope slide but most of the unstained part was …show more content…

All the chromosome pairs line up in the centre of the cell along spindle fibres that pull to either side of the cell.
During anaphase, the spindle fibres become shorter and pull each chromosome pair apart to the opposite ends of the cell.
At the stage of telophase, there is a faint cell plate. The nuclear envelope is reformed and then, cytokinesis takes place. A new cell wall is created down the centre and two daughter cells are formed.
The nuclear membrane reforms around the chromosomes grouped at either pole of the cell, the chromosomes uncoil and become diffuse, and the spindle fibres disappear. In plants a cell plate forms along the line of the metaphase plate.
Stages of Mitosis
In meiosis cell division is more complex. Sister chromatids, which are the two halves of a duplicated chromosome and homologous chromosomes, which are the similar but non-identical chromosome pairs an organism receives from its two parents, are separated by a two-step division process.
Cell division occurs twice during meiosis. This means that one starting cell can produce four gametes, and in each process of division, cells go through the stages of prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase. During meiosis I, homologue pairs are separated and sister chromatids are separate during meiosis

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