Practice question

Mendel chose Pisum sativum, the garden pea, for his classic experiments because it offers easily distinguishable contrasting characters, self-fertilizing bisexual flowers allowing controlled pollination, short generation time, high seed yield and availability of true-breeding varieties. Seven characters he studied such as seed shape and flower colour exhibited discontinuous variation without environmental blending. Drosophila melanogaster, Zea mays and Arabidopsis thaliana emerged later as models for linkage and molecular genetics, but pea initially provided ideal simplicity revealing particulate inheritance. Mastery ensures accurate interpretation of monohybrid and dihybrid progeny arrays, distinguishing dominance interactions from epistasis or linkage effects.