Ever wonder how babies are made? And no this isn’t the birds and the bees, it’s the more in depth version. Not what is actually is, I’m talking about the science behind this reproduction. As me and my class learned, the event which is occurring is called meiosis. The short and easy way to explain is to produce gametes, the sperm and eggs, with half of the genetic complement of the parent cells. The official definition is: Meiosis is a type of cell division in sexually reproducing organisms that reduces the number of chromosomes in gametes (the sex cells, or egg and sperm). In humans, body (or somatic) cells are diploid, containing two sets of chromosomes (one from each parent). That sounds complicated, but it’s really not. We also learned about mitosis which is a similar word, has a similar meaning, but is different. WE focused on this one more by doing an experiment with garlic.
What we did with the garlic is we planted them in a little cup of dirt, waited about a week, and the went through a procedure that included cutting it, soaking it with water and something blue and poisonous, then putting it under a microscope to see what stages of mitosis we could find. The blue photo you see is the photos I took of my garlic root, and although it may look like it has something going on in there it very much doesn’t. The other lighter one is a photo I took from a mitosis slide meant to replicate the stages of meiosis, and out of that I did get good photos out of.
And the final piece is we has to make a narrated video comparing the slide photos that we took to models that we made of the phases of mitosis. There are many phases and many similar things in my models, and I pointed out while explaining what those were. Learning to movie skills in maker also helped my create the video, so I guess you can use things you learn in class outside of it.