Mitosis

Mitosis concerns the events that take place inside the nucleus during division, and it is the most extensively studied form of nuclear division because it is by far the most common. In plants, mitosis is largely confined to meristematic tissues such as the shoot and root tips, the actively growing regions of the plant body, and to other tissues associated with growth generally. Because the daughter and parent cells end up with exactly the same chromosome number, mitosis is described as an equational division - it does not change ploidy, only makes more of the same. A simple laboratory activity used to study mitosis directly is a squash preparation of an onion root tip, which spreads the actively dividing meristematic cells thinly enough on a slide that the different mitotic stages can be seen and photographed under a light microscope after staining. Mitosis is conventionally described as passing through four successive stages - prophase, metaphase, anaphase …