Onion Root Mitosis Lab

Objective- In this post, the cell cycle is going to be applied to the world of onions. The post will explore the presence of the cell cycle in onion root tips. To do this, an online virtual lab will be used to stimulate actually viewing the cells of an onion root under a microscope. This lab can be found here: http://www.biology.arizona.edu/cell_bio/activities/cell_cycle/assignment.html.

	Interphase	Prophase	Metaphase	Anaphase	Telophase
number of cells	20	10	3	2	1	36
percent of cells	55.6%	27.8%	8.3%	5.6%	2.8%	100%

Data Analysis- As you can see, a large percentage of the cells presented were in the interphase stage, more than half. Since interphase is the "resting period" of the cell's life, not a true stage of mitosis, it can be concluded that of the 36 cells presented, only 4.5% were experiencing the mitosis process. According to the data, it can be understood that besides interphase, prophase is the longest stage of mitosis. 10 of the 36 cells were in the prophase, showing that once they entered the prophase, it took a long time to cross over into metaphase.  A cell in interphase can be recognized by the fact that the cell has a fully constructed nucleus and cell wall. A cell in metaphase can be recognized based on how the chromosomes in the cell are aligned. If the chromosomes are aligned in the center of the cell with spindles connecting them to the outsides of the cell, without trace of a nucleus, it can be determined that the cell is in metaphase.

To put into perspective how the number of cells in each phase related to each other, this pie chart was created with the numerical data collected during the experiment.

http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx?ID=22469a07aaf4425f91873c361a92f325