Gregor Mendel And His Findings

 Introduction

Have you ever wondered why you have blue eyes if your dad has green eyes? Or why your hair is curly but your mom's hair is straight as a board? Well that's exactly what I am going to be talking about in this blog. Perhaps you have heard of this guy named Gregor Mendel. If not that's okay. He was a learner, teacher, and a scientist. He used pea plants as his model system for Inheritance Demonstrated traits that are transmitted from parents to offspring in specific patterns. In other words, he used pea plants to identify how genes are passed from parent to its offspring. How we obtain our traits. He found that plants always produce offspring that look like the parent. Gregor Mendel helped make what we call punnet squares, which we all have all probably heard about in school. He also founded the Fundamental laws of inheritance which is very important to science today. 



Background

Like I stated earlier Gregor Mendel was a learner, teacher, and a scientist. He was taught physics, botany, and natural science courses. He taught at secondary and university levels. His first research began with him investigating inheritance patterns in honeybees and plants. With this, he eventually led to pea plants as his model system. In 1865, Mendel presented his findings and published his work. In his work, he demonstrated that traits are transmitted from parents to offspring. At first, his work went unnoticed. This was because the science community at the time, believed that the inheritance process was a blending of the parent's traits, which produced an intermediate physical appearance in offspring. It wasn't until 1900, that Mendel's work was understood and appreciated. 

Fundamental Laws of Inheritance

Through his work, Mendel developed the laws of inheritance. Mendel proposed these laws after 7 years of conducting experiments. Mendel's law of inheritance includes 3 laws:law of dominance, law of segregation, and the law of independent assortment. The law of dominance was the first one that Mendel discovered. The law said that hybrid offspring inherit the dominant trait in the phenotype. The next one is the law of independent assortment.This law states that genes for different traits can segregate independently. The final law Mendel founded is the law of segregation. This law states that alleles segregate into gametes randomly. Even today, scientists use Mendel's laws to explain the most basic facts of inheritance.

Punnet Squares

Now just to clarify, Gregor Mendel did not actually invent punnet squares. His ideas helped develop punnet squares. So even though he didn't invent them, he played a key role in them being founded. Through his experiments with pea plants, he found that genes are inherited and come in pairs. One from each parent. Mendel tracked parental genes and their appearance in offspring as dominant or recessive traits. This would later be used when Reginald Crandall Bateson founded punnet squares in 1905. Punnet squares are used to see what is the likelihood of a gene actually being passed from the parent to the offspring. 



Conclusion

So hopefully after reading this blog, you can see how great Gregor Mendel actually was. He founded many of the principles that we use today that helps determine why we look like our mom and maybe not like our dad. Even though his principles were not very appreciated back then, they definitely are now. 


References 

1. Ilona Miko(2008). Gregor Mendel and the Principles of Inheritance. Scitable by nature EDUCATION. 

2. Lisa Limeri. Chapter 10: Mendel's Peas and Punnet Squares. Texas Tech Universities Library. 

3. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). DNA Learning Center.


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