Thus, he was able to select the parent traits, pollinate the flowers, and count the results in the offspring with no complicating elements. Peas are self-pollinated, and the seven traits he chose to measure are inherited as single factors, so Mendel could establish true-breeding lines for each trait. Some say Mendel was lucky, others that his reported results are too good to be true, that he (or someone else) must have fudged the data to make them “come out right.” His choice of garden peas was fortuitous. His “factors” were, of course, the genes, which do, indeed, come in pairs or alleles for each trait. Closer still to the actual truth, Mendel even hypothesized that two factors, probably one from each parent, interacted to produce the results. Remember, no one had yet heard of genes, chromosomes, or meiosis, but Mendel concluded from his breeding experiments that particles or “factors” that passed from the parents to the offspring through the gametes were directly responsible for the physical traits he saw first lost in the offspring's generation, then repeated in the next. During the next 30 years, the universality of his findings was confirmed, and breeding programs for better livestock and crop plants-and the science of genetics-were well under way.Īt the time of Mendel's work, scientists widely believed that offspring blended the characteristics of their parents, but Mendel's painstaking experimentation suggested this was not so.
The significance of his paper published in 1866 on inheritance in peas (which he grew in the monastery garden) apparently went unnoticed for the next 34 years until three separate botanists, who also were theorizing about heredity in plants, independently cited the work in 1900. He published only two papers in his lifetime and died unheralded in 1884. The breeding experiments of the monk Gregor Mendel in the mid‐1800s laid the groundwork for the science of genetics. Materials Used by Organisms Are Recycled.Plant Interactions with Other Organisms.Plants Among the Diversity of Organisms.Respiration: Energy for Plant Metabolism.
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