Gregor Mendel was a nineteenth-century Austrian monk who is widely regarded as being the founder of genetics in modern science. There had been existing knowledge that crossbreeding plants and animals could enable the desired characteristics to be passed on. However, it was his groundbreaking discoveries he made via pea plant experiments conducted by him over 1856 to 1863 that showed how certain traits are passed on to next generation. Over this time period he is said to have tested over 5000 pea plants and from this he derived the law of Mendelian Inheritance
He was able to predict the probabilities of certain characteristics being passed onto the offspring of plants. He showed that certain factors, now known as genes, affected …show more content…
The law of segregation states that when the gamete is being produced, each allele for each gene is carried on a single gamete so that the alleles for each gene have been segregated from one another. It is during fertilisation when the two gametes fuse that the pairing of the alleles occurs. The second law of independent assortment suggests that the genes for different characteristics are separated independently during the production of gametes. The third law of dominance says that alleles can be dominant or recessive. However, it is only the dominant alleles that will be expressed in the phenotype if it is present. In a cross pollination experiment between yellow and green pea plants exclusively, the first generation offspring was always yellow. However, the second generation consistently produced offspring in a ration of 3:1. This ration continued though out further generations. This means the first generation was homozygous but the second became heterozygous. These laws and experiments underline monohybrid inheritance because they form the basis of the punnett square, a visual representation of Mendelian Inheritance, which represents the probabilities of certain alleles being