Basics 3 min read
Life Cycles of Sexually Reproducing Organisms
Fertilization and meiosis alternate in sexual life cycles. What happens between these two events depends on the organism. The process…
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Basics 2 min read
The Red Queen Hypothesis
There is no question that sexual reproduction provides evolutionary advantages to organisms that employ this mechanism to produce offspring. The…
Basics 3 min read
Introduction to the Cellular Basis of Inheritance
Figure 7.1 Each of us, like these other large multicellular organisms, begins life as a fertilized egg. After trillions of…
Basics 3 min read
Mitotic Spindle Apparatus
The precise timing and formation of the mitotic spindle is critical to the success of eukaryotic cell division. Prokaryotic cells,…
Basics 2 min read
Prokaryotic Cell Division
Prokaryotes such as bacteria propagate by binary fission. For unicellular organisms, cell division is the only method to produce new…
Basics 5 min read
Cancer and the Cell Cycle
Cancer is a collective name for many different diseases caused by a common mechanism: uncontrolled cell division. Despite the redundancy and overlapping…
Basics 3 min read
Control of the Cell Cycle
The length of the cell cycle is highly variable even within the cells of an individual organism. In humans, the…
Basics 3 min read
Cytokinesis
Cytokinesis is the second part of the mitotic phase during which cell division is completed by the physical separation of the…
Basics 6 min read
The Cell Cycle
The cell cycle is an ordered series of events involving cell growth and cell division that produces two new daughter…
Basics 5 min read
Introduction to Reproduction at the Cellular Level
Figure 6.1 A sea urchin begins life as a single cell that (a) divides to form two cells, visible by…
Basics 4 min read
Photosynthesis
The shared evolutionary history of all photosynthetic organisms is conspicuous, as the basic process has changed little over eras of…
Basics 3 min read
The Calvin Cycle
After the energy from the sun is converted and packaged into ATP and NADPH, the cell has the fuel needed…