And so the 5th and final phase of mitosis is telophase. And recall you could think that the t in telophase is for the t in tail end. And hopefully, that will help you remember that telophase is the final phase of mitosis. And so again the final step of mitosis is telophase. And it turns out that the final step of mitosis, telophase is actually, it's practically the opposite or the reverse of prophase and prometaphase.
And so if you can remember prophase and prometaphase then you already know the events that take place in telophase because again, they're practically the opposite or the reverse. And so recall that in prophase, the loosely coiled chromatin would condense into tightly coiled chromosomes, but here in telophase, it's the tightly coiled chromosomes that begin to revert back to the loosely coiled chromatin state. And recall that during prophase and prometaphase, the mitotic spindle would begin to form. But here in telophase, the mitotic spindle is going to degrade or break down. And then also, of course, recall from our previous lesson videos that during prophase and prometaphase, the nucleolus and the nuclear envelope would degrade or disappear, break down.
Whereas here in telophase, the reverse is happening, the nucleolus and nuclear envelope are going to reform. And they're going to reform at each end of the cell in order to form 2 nuclei. And ultimately that is the conclusion of mitosis, taking 1 nucleus and, separating the DNA to form 2 nuclei. And so let's take a look at our image down below here which again is showing you all of the phases of mitosis and already in our previous lesson videos we've covered prophase, prometaphase, metaphase, and anaphase. And so here in this video we're focusing on telophase whose image is over here on the right and of course, the events of telophase are here in the middle.
And again, the events of telophase are pretty much the complete opposite or reverse of prophase and prometaphase. And so what's going to happen is the chromosomes are going to begin to unwind back into the chromatin state, the nucleolus is going to reform, the nuclear envelope is also going to reform, and ultimately there are going to be 2 nuclei, that are formed at each end of the cell. And the mitotic spindle is also broken down, so you can see that the mitotic spindle is no longer there. The nucleus has reformed at each end of the cell. The nucleolus, which is the structure here for ribosome synthesis, has also reformed, and the chromosomes have begun to unwind into their chromatin state.
And so really this here concludes our introduction to telophase and we'll be able to get some practice applying these concepts as we move forward. So I'll see you all in our next video.