What Mitosis Lab is
Mitosis Lab is a free, browser-based cell-lineage simulator. It starts
with one cell and lets you watch it divide, again and again, into a
branching family tree. Each division is stochastic, drawn from a mean
interval with jitter, and each daughter inherits a slightly mutated
copy of its mother's traits. The colony that grows is a genealogy you
can read: colour marks a sub-lineage, and distance from the centre
marks a generation. It is built for biology students, educators, and
anyone who likes a living system to poke at, and it runs entirely in
your browser with nothing to install.
How to use it
- Press play to start the founding cell dividing.
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Drag mutation rate up to watch sub-lineages fan out into new
colours, or down to hold a single hue.
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Change the division interval and jitter to move between a slow,
synchronised colony and a fast, staggered one.
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Set a seed and share the URL. The seed and every parameter travel in
the link, so whoever opens it sees the exact same run.
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Let the population reach its cap to trigger the colony-saturated
summary, then reseed for a fresh tree.
FAQ
- What is a cell-lineage tree?
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It is the branching diagram biologists use to trace which cell came
from which. The root is the founding cell; every fork is one
division into two daughters. Mitosis Lab draws that tree live as the
colony grows.
- Is the simulation scientifically accurate?
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It is a teaching model, not a research tool. It captures two real
ideas faithfully: division timing is stochastic rather than
clockwork, and traits are inherited with drift. It does not model a
specific organism, cell-cycle checkpoints, or cell death.
- What do the colours mean?
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Colour is an inherited trait that drifts when a mutation fires. A
branch that shifts from green toward cyan or magenta marks a
sub-lineage carrying that mutation, so you can trace a mutation back
to the cell where it started.
- Why is every run reproducible?
-
The whole simulation is a pure function of its seed and parameters,
driven by a seeded PRNG and a fixed timestep. The same seed and knobs
always produce the same tree, at any frame rate, which is why a
shared link recreates a run exactly.
- Does it work on a phone?
-
Yes. The stage fills the top of the screen and the controls become a
bottom sheet, with touch targets sized for a thumb.
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