BIOL*1090 Winter 2016

Seminar #1 questions

1) The cells in the epithelial lining of your gut turn over approximately every 5-6
days. Intestinal stem cells need to keep dividing to keep up with this high turnover.
Are these stem cells undergoing meiosis or mitosis? Support your answer.

Mitosis: the intestinal stem cells are somatic cells and therefore undergo mitotic
divisions to create two genetically identical daughter cells. Only germ cells undergo
meiosis, to generate 4 haploid cells that are non-identical.

2a) What is chromosome non-disjunction?

Failure of two homologous chromosomes to disjoin or separate.

b) At what specific stage in the cell cycle would it occur?

Anaphase I of Meiosis

c) What is a human condition that is caused by chromosome non-disjunction?

Down Syndrome is a result of an extra copy of chromosome 21, also called “trisomy
21”.

3) The zebrafish haploid genome contains 1.4 X 109 nucleotide pairs of DNA.
How many nucleotide pairs of DNA are present in each of the following cells:
a) Somatic cell: 2.8 x 109
b) Fertilized egg: 2.8 x 109
c) Sperm cell: 1.4 x 109
d) A primary oocyte in prophase I: 5.6 x 109

4) In what ways are the packaging of prokaryotic and eukaryotic chromosomes into
living cells similar?

Both involve supercoiling of DNA and the attachment of DNA to some kind of
scaffold