Pea
Science

In the mid-19th century, Austrian monk Gregor Mendel 's observations of pea pods led to the principles of Mendelian genetics, the foundation of modern genetics. He ended up growing and examining about 28,000 pea plants in the course of his experiments.

Mendel chose peas for his experiments because he could grow them easily, pure-bred strains were readily available, and the structure of the flowers protect them from cross-pollination, and cross pollination was easy. Mendel cross-bred tall and dwarf pea plants, green and yellow peas, purple and white flowers, wrinkled and smooth peas, and a few other traits. He then observed the resulting offspring. In each of these cases, one trait is dominant and all the offspring, or Filial-1 (abbreviated F) generation, showed the dominant trait. Then he allowed the F generation to self pollinate and observed their offspring, the Filial-2 (abbreviated F) generation. The F plants had the dominant trait in approximately a 3:1 ratio. He studied later generations of self pollinated plants, and performed crosses to determine the nature of the pollen and egg cells.

Mendel reasoned that each parent had a 'vote' in the appearance of the offspring, and the non-dominant, or recessive, trait appeared only when it was inherited from both parents. He did further experiments that showed each trait is separately inherited. Unwittingly, Mendel had solved a major problem with Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution: how new traits were preserved and not blended back into the population, a question Darwin himself did not answer. Mendel's work was published in an obscure Austrian journal and was not rediscovered until about 1900.
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