The Cell Cycle
[Figure 25] is a diagram of the cell cycle. Try to imagine the cell cycle as a race track and individual cells as cars that race around it. You are sitting at the finish wire, which is mitosis (we chose mitosis because it is easy to recognize when the cell is observed with the aid of a microscope). At a certain time during the race, all the cars in a portion of the track, say a 200-yard sector of the backstretch, are sprayed with a blue dye as they race by. These cars are now marked, just as cells synthesizing DNA are marked if briefly exposed to tritiated thymidine, the common radioactive precursor of DNA. As soon as these cars have been sprayed, you observe all the cars as they pass the finish line in front of you. At first, you will see cars that were nearest the wire and were not sprayed; then the dye-marked cars will pass; and finally more unmarked cars, those that had passed the finish line but had not reached the spray area when the marking was done, will come by. If you replace the words spray, cars, and wire with the words radioactivity, cells, and mitosis, you have described the cell cycle and the flow of cells in the cycle.
Now, if all cars were going at the same speed, you could calculate with great accuracy the time taken for any one car to go around the track, or from the finish line to the backstretch, or through the spray sector, and so on. However, since cars move at different speeds, you can only obtain an average time for all sprayed cars. Similarly, since individual cells behave differently, you can only obtain averages of the times these cells spend in the various portions of the cell cycle.
Figure 25
THE CELL CYCLE
These cell-cycle portions are four in number, according to nomenclature originated by A. Howard and S. R. Pelc, two English investigators who first described the cycle: (1) mitosis; (2) G₁, which is the period between mitosis and DNA synthesis; (3) S phase, which is the period during which DNA is replicated; and (4) G₂, which is the period between DNA synthesis and the next mitosis. Only cells in the S phase (DNA synthesis) are marked when exposed to a radioactive precursor of DNA.