 Hello everyone. It's now time for us to talk about the process of meiosis. If you recall earlier, we talked about mitosis, which happens pretty much everywhere in the body. Alternatively, meiosis only happens in one place and only produces one type of cell, gametes. Meiosis happens either in the ovaries of females or in the testes of the males. Another main difference between meiosis and mitosis is the fact in meiosis, you end up with two daughter cells that have half the number of chromosomes as what you started with in the parent cell. And that's actually really important because if you think about it, when you have an agonist sperm get together and you form a zygote, which will eventually turn into a baby, you have to have the exact and bright number of chromosomes. Too much information or too little information are most of the time fatal. In meiosis, there are several other different key steps. First of all, in the process of prophase one, your chromosomes start to coil up to produce those X's again, but you also start to have what are known as your homologous chromosomes pairing up. What is a homologous chromosome? Well, within organisms that are considered diploid, meaning you have two copies of like chromosomes, each copy that will pair with its mate. So these copies are based on shape and on the genes that are found within them. You get one copy of chromosomes from Iran and one copy of chromosomes for your dad. And in prophase one, these homologous pairs start to pair up together. Then in metaphase one, these pairs line up on the equator like so. You then have anaphase one where the spindle fibers grab on to your chromosomes and start to pull your X's apart. And then we have telophase one whereby you end up with your chromosomes, homologous chromosomes being split. Your pairs are split. It's incredibly important to note that at this particular stage, when you begin, you have one, two, three, four different chromosomes. Remember, half of these chromosomes came from your mom and half of them came from your dad. And these are going to actually split. And what you end up with in your daughter's cells after you undergo cytokinesis is half that number. So we started out with four and we ended up with two in each of our daughter's cells. This particular stage is known as reductional division because you reduce the number of chromosomes you have within each of your cells. You start out with four in this example and you end up with two. Then each of these daughter's cells is going to undergo a second round of meiosis known as meiosis two. The first part is known as meiosis one and the second one is meiosis two. In meiosis two, again, we have prophase two where our chromosomes are coiled up. We then have metaphase two where the chromosomes are lined up on the equator and they get ready to divide. We have anaphase two where the chromosomes get pulled apart and start to travel to each of the poles. And then we have telophase two where our chromosomes are pulled apart and at the opposite poles. And finally, we undergo cytokinesis where the cells split. This happens in every single daughter cell. So it happened in this daughter cell and it happens again in this daughter cell. So what you end up with are four different daughter cells. Each now having two chromosomes. In this case, we started out with two chromosomes, one and two. Remember these two are identical to one another. We end up with two chromosomes in our daughter cells, one and two. So this is known as equational division because it's equal. You start out with two and you end up with two. What happens from this point is that these cells will then go and form gametes. In the male, these will form sperm. In the female, one of these, any one of these, will be chosen to form the egg and the others along the way will tend to be discarded as waste. The females only produce one egg through the process of meiosis whereas males will produce four sperm. Hopefully this has given you a good idea of the process of meiosis and why it's important. Without it, we wouldn't be able to reproduce and have children.