Significance of Mitosis

Mitosis is also called the equational division because each daughter cell ends up with exactly the same chromosome number and the same genetic content as the parent cell. It is important to understand why this kind of division matters so much in the life of an organism.

Mitosis is generally confined to diploid cells. There are, however, exceptions: in some lower plants and in certain social insects, even haploid cells are able to divide by mitosis.

The main reasons mitosis is significant are as follows:

• Identical daughter cells. Mitosis usually produces diploid daughter cells that carry an identical genetic complement to the parent — the two new cells are genetically the same as the cell they came from.

• Growth of the organism. The growth of multicellular organisms is brought about by mitosis, as repeated divisions steadily increase the number of cells in the body.

• Restoring the nucleo-cytoplasmic ratio. As a cell grows larger, the balance between the size of the nucleus and the amount of cytoplasm gets disturbed. Dividing allows the cell to bring this nucleo-cytoplasmic ratio back to a proper level. …