In this video, we're going to begin our introduction to cytokinesis. Recall from our previous lesson videos that the M phase of the cell cycle consists of both mitosis and cytokinesis. Already in our previous lesson videos, we've covered the 5 phases of mitosis. Recall that mitosis ends up dividing the nucleus and, at the end of mitosis, you still technically have a single cell with 2 nuclei. Hence, mitosis needs to be followed by another process called cytokinesis.
Cytokinesis is technically the process that's going to produce 2 identical daughter cells by separating the 2 nuclei. Cytokinesis can be defined as the division of the cytoplasm, essentially separating one cell into two cells. It turns out that animal and plant cell cytokinesis actually differ in their mechanisms. Moving forward, we will talk about animal cytokinesis and plant cytokinesis in their own separate videos. So, I'll see you all in our next video to talk about animal cell cytokinesis.