  One approach in modern cosmology consists in supposing that dark matter and
dark energy are different manifestations of a single `quartessential' fluid.
Following such idea, this work presents a study of the evolution of
perturbations of density in a flat cosmological model with a modified Chaplygin
gas acting as a single component. Our goal is to obtain properties of the model
which can be used to distinguish it from another cosmological models which have
the same solutions for the general evolution of the scale factor of the
universe, without the construction of the power spectrum. Our analytical
results, which alone can be used to uniquely characterize the specific model
studied in our work, show that the evolution of the density contrast can be
seen, at least in one particular case, as composed by a spheroidal wave
function. We also present a numerical analysis which clearly indicates as one
interesting feature of the model the appearence of peaks in the evolution of
the density constrast.
