Genetics: Mendelian inheritance — Mendel's Experiments and the Law of Segregation
How Mendel's pea crosses revealed that each parent passes on one of two intact alleles, and how to predict the odds that follow.
Try 3 questions
1. Why were garden peas a good choice for Mendel's inheritance experiments?
- Clear-cut traits and easily controlled pollination
- Their genes never undergo mutation
- They have unusually few genes
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Answer: Clear-cut traits and easily controlled pollination
Peas show traits in sharp either/or forms, normally self-pollinate, and can be hand-crossed by moving pollen, so Mendel controlled exactly who the parents were.
2. What did Mendel mean by a 'true-breeding' plant?
- It was grown from wild, uncultivated stock
- Self-pollinated, it always passes on the same trait
- It produces more seeds than average
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Answer: Self-pollinated, it always passes on the same trait
A true-breeding line is homozygous for the trait, so generation after generation of self-pollination yields offspring identical to the parent for that character.
3. Mendel crossed true-breeding purple-flowered peas with true-breeding white-flowered ones. What did the F1 generation look like?
- Half purple and half white
- All a pale lavender in between
- All purple
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Answer: All purple
Every F1 plant carried one purple and one white allele, and since purple is dominant, all of them showed purple flowers.
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