What was Mendel’s pea experiment?
- Offspring looks just like parents because of
- Aristotle believed that the offspring is formed from an undifferentiated mass and assumed that the characteristics were passed onto the offspring through the
- 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
- These were the major misconceptions until Gregor Mendel came and contributed his revolutionary
- 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
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 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 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
- 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
Pea plant experiment
- This research contradicted the blending theory which existed before. If the traits of the parents would blend, then all the plants in the F1 generation would have had medium heights.
The allele of shortness was recessive in the first generation or was hidden, but it expressed itself in the second. The expression of the allele of a particular genotype is called the Phenotype