The M phase of the cell cycle is actually two distinct processes. Mitosis and cytokinesis mitosis is gonna be all about separating the cells, chromosomes into the two new nuclei of the daughter cells. Well, cytokinesis is all about dividing cells, cytoplasm and the cell membrane. When you learn this, you're gonna be looking at a lot of diagrams in your textbook and those diagrams are gonna have a lot of detail, but they're gonna be static, they don't move and the M phase is all about moving things around. So sometimes I think it's important before you learn that detail to take a step back and see this entire process through. So we're gonna start looking at prophase and in prophase, we prepare, we break up the cell nucleus and condense those chromosomes so that we can move them around. In pro metaphase, we arrange those chromosomes and they connect to the spindle fires so that in metaphase, they can line up in metaphase, they line up so that in anaphase, we can separate them, we can pull them apart to the opposite poles of the cell. Now, once they reach those opposite poles, we can start telophase where we reform the nuclei and those chromosomes can de condense again. Now, during telophase, you can see that we were also doing cytokinesis that cytoplasm divided. And so did the cell membrane. Now learning these stages in order can be difficult for some people. So I have a little ammonic device that helps keep it straight in my head and it goes like this. Pretty please make another tiny cell. Pretty please make another tiny cell prophase pro metaphase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase and cytokinesis. And if we've done it, all right, by the end, we have made another tiny cell.
