What happens in the four stages of mitosis?
In this video, I describe the four stages of mitosis, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase.
During metaphase, the sister chromatids align in the middle of the cell.
However for this to happen a couple of things had to happen during prophase
During prophase, the chromatin condensed into x shaped chromosomes.
Each half of the x is a sister chromatin with identical copies of the DNA
In other words, a sister chromatin is 'one-half' of the duplicated chromosome.
The two sides of the x shaped chromosome is attached at the centromere.
Centromeres are the regions of DNA where the sister chromatids are most tightly connected.
During anaphase, the chromosomes line up in the middle of the cell.
The chromosomes move away from each other during the phase of mitosis called anaphase.
Finally, in telophase, the nuclear membrane reappears and the cell pinches in the middle.