Table of Contents
- Mendel’s Pea Experiment
– Procedure of Mendel’s Experiment
- Summary
- What’s Next?
In the last segment of the chapter ‘Heredity and Evolution’, we learnt about alleles. In this segment, let us learn about the pea experiment of Gregor Mendel.
What was Mendel’s pea experiment?
- Offspring looks just like parents because of genes.
- Aristotle believed that the offspring is formed from an undifferentiated mass and assumed that the characteristics were passed onto the offspring through the blood.
- It was also believed that the characteristics of two parents would blend leading to an offspring which had an amalgamation of the traits of the two parents.
- These were the major misconceptions until Gregor Mendel came and contributed his revolutionary research.
- He studied the pea plants in his garden which had several variations like different heights, the different colours of the pods and the different shapes of the seeds.
How did Mendel experiment on pea plants?
- Mendel took two pea plants, tall and short, and cross-pollinated them. The fertilization of two flowers belonging to two different plants is called Cross-pollination. This was called the P generation or Parent generation.
- When the tall and short plants were cross-fertilized, the offspring were all tall pea plants. This is called the F1 generation or First filial generation.
- One plant of the F1 generation was self-pollinated, a process in which the flowers of one plant were fertilized with other flowers of the same plant to produce new plants. This was called P2 or Second parent generation.
- There were three tall pea plants and one short pea plant. The numbers are expressive of the ratio of the tall plants to the short plants.
- One-fourth of the F2 generation exhibited the shortness of the P generation while three- fourth of them were tall. The shortness allele of the parent generation wasn’t expressed in the F1 generation but it expressed itself in the F2 generation.
