Please help with getting the following assignment started. Suppose you are interested in the behavior of an organism; let's say zebras. You are interested in how much time they spend eating, sleeping, running, conducting "zebra" play, and so on. You could make a movie of individual animals, but this might be very inefficient. Getting one zebra's worth of data for one day would take you a whole day of filming. Instead, you could take random images of a herd of many zebras and then count the zebras in each image doing specific things. This might be more efficient than filming one zebra at a time, but you'd have to think a bit about how to interpret the data. For one thing, if an event was very short (say only a minute or two), you might miss those events by taking random pictures, unless you took a lot of images and looked at a lot of zebra pictures. Now imagine that to gather more data you hire someone to take images for you, but when you analyze the images you discover that there were no sleeping zebras in the images. You might conclude that zebras do not sleep, or that they sleep for very short periods of time. On the other hand, you might conclude that your assistant was sleeping instead of taking pictures while the zebras were asleep. So, there are a lot of things to consider when designing the experiment and interpreting the data. Create and discuss a hypothesis regarding what you expect to see. In part 2, you will be analyzing a number of images containing pictures of cells stained to reveal their DNA and mitotic spindles, and you will use your knowledge of the events of mitosis to count the cells at each stage: Interphase, Prophase, Prometaphase, Metaphase, Anaphase, and Telophase. Do you think all stages will have equal counts? Why or why not? If not, which stage of mitosis do you think will be most, least, etc. common in your data and why? What do you know about what happens at each stage of cell division, and how long (relatively) might that require? Note: most of the cells will be in interphase because it is the longest part of the cell cycle. The assignment is to discuss the stages of mitosis. Do not tell me your hypothesis is that most cells will be in interphase. Part 2: TBD

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