Saturday, December 13, 2008

Mitosis



In this lab we just looked through the microscope at some cells that were reproducing. That week we had learned all about mitosis and how it works so we were a bit excited to see some actual cells. The first thing we looked at were some Ascaris cells; Ascaris is the largest type of parasitic roundworm in the world. Most of the cells that were undergoing mitosis were quite clear and we were mostly able to determine what stage of mitosis they were in. But when we looked at the allium onion root tip, it was very difficult to find cells that were in mitosis though we were able to find a few. The strangest thing we found was that in telophase the animal cells were blended together but the plant cells actually had a division between the two newly formed cells.

An interesting page about mitosis can be found here.

2 comments:

Shasta said...

We had a hard time finding mitosis in the plant cells too...

Kim said...

actually, I think we saw mitosis in lots of them. They were mostly in Prophase, where the nucleus appeared dark all over. We had to look through all these to randomly find a much smaller # of cells with mitosis occurring at the other phases. They were scattered, but they were there.
Crazy Cool!