Question

I’m programming genetic processes in java for my project and I want simulate the mitosis of a human cell. A human cell contains 23 pairs of chromosome. Mitosis is basically a cell division, or reproduction, in which a cell gives rise to two genetically identical daughter cells. You can find a picture about it here (scroll a little bit down the page):

Mitosis

I think that this mitosis would be like a java method in a class “Cell” for example. So i made a class Chromosome with it’s own methods to represent a single chromosome and made a class “Cell” containing 23 pairs of chromosomes. I plan on putting the method mitosis in the class Cell but the problem is that this method should return 2 identical cells and I think it’s impossible to create a method that returns 2 cells in this class.
I thought about making a method that would return an array of 2 cells it doesn’t work.
Any suggestions an how to create this method? Or maybe another approach than the one i’m using? Thanks.

Answer 1

I would suggest that Cell implements Cloneable and use the copy constructor idiom on clone() method.

On doMitosis() method in Cell you basically do something like this:

public Cell[] doMitosis() {
    Cell[] cells = new Cell[]{this.clone(), this.clone()};
    return cells;
}

PS. Code is a rough sketch, not actual implementation. Also, this code takes into consideration that the parent cell must be killed (and garbage collected) so that the 2 identical cells can have right of way.