Question

(2 points)You are studying a species of alga. Haploid cells have 17 chromosomes. Is this surprising that this is an odd number? Why or why not? (2 points) You are studying a species of single-celled yeast. For a group of cells that you are studying, you notice that during mitosis, some cells have 5 groups of chromosomes on the metaphase plate and others have 10 groups of chromosomes. What do you think is going on?

Answer 1

This is NOT surprising. In algae, the dominant phase of the life cycle is haploid. In this phase, the given algae is having 17 chromosomes. When two different algal strains will fuse, they will form a diploid zygote, with 34 chromosomes. This will be short lived and because it has even number of chromosomes, it can easily undergo reduction division to form haploid algal thallus again.

This may be because of the reason that some of the cells have fused to form cells having double the number of chromosomes. In the same species, there can be cells with two different strains. These have fuses to form a cell having 10 chromosomes and now they are undergoing mitosis along with the original cells having 5 chromosomes.

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