What are Mendel’s Laws of Heredity?

Mendel’s laws of heredity refer to biological concepts of heredity first uncovered by

the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who lived in the early 1800s. Mendel conducted
experiments crossing various sizes and colors of pea plants and recording the
outcomes of these crosses – revolutionized the understanding of heredity. Taken
together, his laws make up the principles of Mendelian inheritance.

At the time of his experiments, Mendel knew nothing about genes or chromosomes.
But through his work, he came to understand that garden peas transmit their visible
traits (phenotypes) like color and height to their offspring in a measurable way. Also,
Mendel found that through careful observation and record-keeping, he could predict
the color and height of pea plants.

Mendel’s First Law – The Law of Segregation

The law of segregation says parental genes for a trait must segregate (separate)

equally and randomly into haploid gametes so that their offspring have an equal
chance of inheriting either allele. This is what happens during meiosis. Offspring
inherit one allele from each parent for a trait and no allele is favored or has an
advantage over the others. Figure 1 shows the male and female pea gametes that
resulted from the segregation of the pod color and texture traits during meiosis.

Mendel’s Second Law – The Law of Independent Assortment

Mendel’s second law says that alleles for traits are passed on independently of each
other. To put it another way, the selection of an allele for a trait has nothing to do
with which allele is selected for a different trait. Mendel discovered this natural law
while doing dihybrid cross experiments. Up to that point, he had been studying
monohybrid crosses which examined just one trait in the pea plants like color or
height. These crosses resulted in a 3:1 ratio between dominant and recessive traits.
But in dihybrid crosses testing the outcome of both traits (see Figure 1), Mendel
found a 9:3:3:1 ratio which shows the independent inheritance of each trait.

Mendel’s Third Law – The Law of Dominance

Also known as simple dominance, Mendel’s third law means that for the two alleles
of a gene, the dominant allele is always expressed because it masks the recessive
allele. Recessive traits are only seen when both alleles are recessive.
Mendel’s monohybrid cross experiments show this. In Figure 1, the peas have green
pods (R) even if they have one allele for yellow pods (r); i.e., RrYy, RrYY.

To have yellow pods, the peas must be homozygous recessive (rr) for the trait. The
same is true for the dominant trait of rough pods (Y) and recessive smooth pods (y).
The pods are only smooth if they are homozygous recessive (yy).
Figure 1 – The image above illustrates the 3 laws of Mendelian inheritance using
parental pea plants that are heterozygous dominant for green, rough pods.

Non-Mendelian Inheritance

There are patterns of inheritance in sexually reproducing organisms that don’t follow
the principles of Mendelian inheritance. For example, incomplete dominance results
when two dominant traits “blend” to create a third phenotype. This is seen when
a plant with red flowers is crossed with a plant with white flowers, resulting in plants
with pink flowers. Codominance occurs when two dominant alleles are expressed in
the phenotype, such as a chicken with black feathers and a chicken with white
feathers having offspring with black and white feathers.

References

Biologydictinoary