Mendel & Inheritance

Gregor Mendel was a European monk living in the middle of

the 19th Century and is often referred to as the father of
genetics. Mendel identified inheritance amongst pea plants
which led to our current understanding of heredity (the
transfer of characteristics from one generation to the next).

Mendel’s Experiments
What Mendel did was pick certain characteristics of pea plants,
called traits, and identified them as possessing one of two
possible qualities. Mendel measured these traits:

1. Seed shape – smooth or wrinkled Mendel in his glory days.

2. Seed colour – yellow or green
3. Pod colour – yellow or green
4. Pod shape – inflated or pinched
5. Flower colour – purple or white
6. Flower position – axial or terminal
7. Stem height – tall or short

Mendel would breed purebred pea plants of one type with one of another type, e.g.
he would breed a purebred short stemmed plant with a pure-bred tall stemmed
plant. These initial plants are called the P or parental generation. The offspring of
these plants were all tall, and this generation was known as the F1 generation.
Mendel then bred the F1 pea plants with one another to get the F2 generation. But
these weren’t all tall – after many repetitions, they occurred in a ration of 3:1
tall:short. Mendel repeated this experiment many times on many plants with the
seven above characteristics, and devised the following rules, which have become
laws of genetics:

1. The law of segregation – there are two factors in plants that control each
characteristic and during reproduction these two factors segregate (one factor
appearing in each gamete (i.e. egg or pollen)). The factors recombine at
fertilisation – they don’t blend, but match together.
2. The law of independent assortment – When pairs segregate, they do so
independently of other factors. (We know this is the case now of genes that
are in separate chromosomes, as it is chromosomes that segregate, not genes).

Inheritance
When we interpret Mendel’s work today we understand its importance to the study
of inheritance. All of Mendel’s traits were coded for by one pair of genes only and
therefore it is a monohybrid cross. Each chromosome of a pair of homologous
chromosomes has an allele for the same gene: these alleles are not necessarily
identical but they do code for the same trait. One such example is eye colour. You
have two chromosomes inside of every cell that contain an allele for eye colour. Even
 though you might have brown eyes, you may have an allele for brown eyes and an
allele for blue eyes. In this case, your phenotype (i.e. how the trait is expressed) is
brown eyes, but your genotype (i.e. the information in the genes) is brown and blue.

Dominant and Recessive Genes

The reason that you have brown eyes when you have the genetic information for
blue and brown eyes is because brown eyes are a dominant trait over blue eyes. This
means that someone with a gene for blue eyes and a gene for brown eyes will always
have brown eyes. This was the case with Mendel’s plants – the allele for tallness was
dominant over that for shortness, so more plants were tall. Only a purebred short
plant would be short, whereas purebred tall plants as well as hybrid plants were tall.
We visualise this with punnet squares. Here is an example of one for height in
Mendel’s pea plants:

The top and left shaded squares represent the genotype of the
HH HH parental generation (P). H is the allele for tall and h is the allele
for short. H is dominant to h.
hh Hh Hh
The white squares represent the genotype of four children in
the F1 generation. Each child has inherited one allele (H or h)
hh Hh Hh from each parent, resulting in four possible genotypes in Fi. In
this case, they are all the same because P are purebred.

If two F1 generation plants reproduced it would have the following result:

There would be three different genotypes: HH, Hh, and hh. HH

Hh Hh and Hh are all going to be tall plants (H is dominant to h so Hh
is tall) and hh will be small. That gives a ratio of 3:1 (Mendel’s
Hh HH Hh original ratio).

Hh Hh hh

Original Crosses F2 second generation

Trait Dominant Recessive Dominant Recessive Total
Seed shape Round Wrinkled 5474 1850 7324
Seed colour Yellow Green 6022 2001 8023
Flower position Axial Terminal 651 207 858
Flower colour Purple White 705 224 929
Pod form Inflated Constricted 882 299 1181
Pod colour Green Yellow 428 152 580
Stem length Tall Short 787 277 1064
A table showing the results Mendel obtained for each trait.