Gregor Mendel: The Father of Genetics

Known as the "father of modern genetics," Gregor Mendel was born in Austria in 1822. He discovered the basic principles of heredity through experiments in his monastery garden. His experiments, although mocked at the time, would later evolve to become the very basis of modern genetics and lead to the study of heredity.

In 1856, Mendel began a decade-long research project to study inheritance patterns. Although he began his research with mice, he later moved on to bees and plants, eventually settling on the garden pea as his primary model system.

Mendel went on to conduct the first well-controlled and brilliantly-designed experiments in genetics. His goal was to create hybrid pea plants and observe the outcome. These observations led to more experiments. For eight years, Mendel cultivated thousands of pea plants and used a paintbrush to transfer pollen from one plant to another to make his crosses. By simply counting peas and keeping meticulous notes, Mendel established the principles of inheritance, coined the terms “dominant” and “recessive”, and was the first to use statistical methods to analyze and predict hereditary information.

His first step was to breed pea plant populations with two different features, such as tall and short height, until all their offspring were identical to the parent. He then bred these offspring with each other to observe how offspring inherit traits. After finding and classifying the dominant and recessive traits, his next step was to allow the generation that displayed only the dominant trait to self fertilize, creating a new generation displaying the recessive trait in a 1:4 ratio.

Over these eight years, Mendel made two completely accurate and important conclusions: his Law of Segregation states that offspring acquire one allele(which are different versions of the same gene, for example, the gene for height will have an allele for short height and an allele for tall height) from each parent and the Law of Dominance, states that offspring will inherit the dominant trait and can only inherit the recessive trait if they inherit two recessive alleles from the parents.

Mendel became one of the most influential scientists in Biology with his discoveries in the field of Genetics, as he had predicted all those years ago with the words, “my time will come”.

Written by Elizza Miriam Mathew

References

(n.d.). Gregor Mendel's Pea Plant Experiment. Retrieved September 2, 2023, from https://www.michigan.gov/explorelabscience/-/media/Project/Websites/explorelabscience/pdf/Lab-Teens-pdf/Gregor_Mendel_Pea_Experiment.pdf?rev=a9d1df30f6b8461b963948b367bf2d99&hash=C1217C490A1F4C8F7AB6284B1251AD03

Gregor Mendel - Life, Experiments & Facts. (n.d.). bio. Biography.com. Retrieved September 2, 2023, from https://www.biography.com/scientists/gregor-mendel

Klug, W. S., Cummings, M. R., Spencer, C. A., Palladino, M. A., & Killian, D. (2019). Essentials of Genetics. Pearson Education.

Mendel and his peas (article) | Heredity. (n.d.). Khan Academy. Retrieved September 2, 2023, from https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/heredity/mendelian-genetics-ap/a/mendel-and-his-peas