Mendel’s data from his seven experiments? What can you tell from the results of these data?

Question

Mendel’s data from his seven experiments? What can you tell from the results of these data?

Answer 1

Gregor Mendel laid the foundation for the modern understanding of inheritance with his experiments on transmission of traits in garden peas. The ideas he developed are still in use today, and his essential insights into the physical nature of inheritance led directly to the understanding of the gene as a physical entity within the cell.

Contributions to Genetics

Mendel's paper of 1865 went unnoticed except for an occasional reference in scientific literature. In 1900 it was rediscovered by scientists, when his theory was generalized as Mendel's laws of heredity. That date also marked the beginning of the science of heredity, which in 1906 was named genetics. Not even after 1900 was Mendel's theory acknowledged as being generally valid, and the Darwinian selection theory was often considered to oppose the Mendelian theory.

Mendel's Scientific Legacy

While neither Mendel nor anyone else in his day knew anything about chromosomes or genes, the laws of inheritance he discovered predicted exactly how genes behave on chromosomes during the reproductive process. Indeed, the factors he discovered are genes, which come in pairs and segregate on separate chromosomes during sperm and egg production, just as he suggested. Gene pairs located on different sets of chromosomes will assort independently during the process. While most genes do not exhibit simple dominance-recessiveness relations, and most traits are governed by more than one gene, it is to Mendel's credit that he began by trying to understand simple systems in order to develop generalizable laws.

Gregor Mendel, who is known as the "father of modern genetics", was inspired by both his professors at university and his colleagues at the monastery to study variation in plants, and he conducted his study in the monastery's garden. Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants (i.e. Pisum sativum). This study showed that one in four pea plants had purebred recessive alleles, two out of four were hybrid and one out of four were purebred dominant. His experiments brought forth two generalisations which later became known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.