Crosses with a single trait & the principle of segregation

All of the concepts above are illustrated in the types of experiments that Mendel carried out with
pea plants. Pea plants aren’t a particularly exciting organism to study, but they were very useful
in figuring out basic patterns of inheritance!  The reason they were so useful is that they have a
lot of traits that are caused by a single gene with a simple dominant/recessive inheritance
pattern (this is actually pretty rare in general – but more on that later).  So what does that
statement in bold mean?  A classic example is pea shape. Peas can be either round or wrinkly,
but not anything in between. Whether they are round or wrinkly is controlled by a single gene
with two alleles, and the round allele is dominant to the wrinkly allele.  The inheritance pattern if
you cross homozygous round and homozygous wrinkly pea plants is illustrated here:

Crosses with two traits and the principle of

independent assortment
Pea plants have a lot of other traits beyond seed
shape, and Mendel studied seven other
traits.  Things become more complex when
you follow more than one trait at at time.  Here
is a cross looking at both pea shape (round or
wrinkly) and pea color (yellow or green). 
Follow the logic of the cross below to see
why offspring demonstrate a 9:3:3:1 ratio
of different phenotypes.

Punnett squares that show two or more

traits illustrate the idea that alleles for
different traits (different genes) are
segregated independently of each other. 
Yellow seeds are not always round, and
green seeds are not always wrinkly; there
can be yellow wrinkly seeds, yellow round seeds, green wrinkly seeds, and green round seeds.
The idea that alleles for different traits are segregated independently is the principle
of independent assortment.