March 18th, 2011 Carter Stumpf

First, to start of class we started discussing the homeowkr from last night. The homework was to anwser three questions on the website. The questions were 1. If egg and sperm cells merge how much chromosones will each one have? 2. How does this relate to homologous pairs of chromosones? and 3. Could we start with a normal cell, go through mitosis and get a sperm/egg cell? Why not?. A homologous pair of chromosones are a set of chromosones that represent the same traits. One chromosone comes from the sperm and the second one comes from the egg. Without one set of chromosones you could have disabilities. Sperm and egg cell combine to make the zygote. A normal cell can't go into mitosis and make a sperm cell because when it goes into mitosis the normal cell would want to make another copy of a normal cell not a sperm or egg cell so therefore it is not possible. The purpose of miosis is to only create a sperm or egg cell. Males only get miosis to start happening when they hit puberty and females are born with it completed. A stemcell is a cell that has deicided what it is going to be yet. Then, Mr. Finley passed out a handout talking about Meiosis. Eukaryotic cells can only reproduce asexually. Then the class ended with a suprise fire drill so therefore we had to finish reading the handout outside.