We now move onto meiosis. Meiosis is a way of producing new cells. Different to mitosis, which results in genetically identical cells, meiosis produces four cells that have only half the number of chromosomes as the parent cell and are genetically unique. This is how gametes are produced. Gametes need to have half the number of chromosomes as a normal body cell (somatic cell) because when two gametes fuse the fertilised egg cell will end up with a full set of 46 chromosomes, 23 from each gamete.
How gametes are produced, and how genetic variation in gametes come about can be read about on pages 140 -143 in the course book. There are good animations of meiosis here, here and here. Don’t worry too much about the terminology – we come back to this when we study mitosis later.
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