Gregor Mendel & his experiments on pea plants
Gregor Mendel was an Austrian scientist who gained fame only after his death when other scientists verified his findings. Mendel showed that inheritance in an individual follows certain patterns of traits from its previous generations. This is now called ‘Laws of Mendelian Inheritance. He did his experiments on pea plants and found the two laws-
Law of Segregation- It states that every individual has a pair of allele(one of a group of genes). The allele are received from parents. For example, one parent has ‘AA’ and other has ‘aa’ phenotypes. Then the offspring may have either ‘AA’ , ‘Aa’ , ‘aA’ or ‘aa’. ‘A’ occurs most frequently and its presence gives the offspring a certain trait, so ‘A’ is the dominant trait and ‘a’ is the recessive trait.
Law of Independent Assortment- This law states that separate genes are there for separate traits and any two traits have nothing to do with each other. For example, an individual’s eye color may be of his father and his height that of his mother. These two traits are independently passes.
