5 public questions tagged with this topic.
Mendel chose pea plants because they have a short life cycle and well-defined contrasting traits.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 4: Principles of Inheritance and Variation Mendel's Laws - Dominance Segregation Independent Assortment
Mendel studied traits like seed shape to explain monohybrid inheritance patterns.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 4: Principles of Inheritance and Variation Mendel's Laws - Dominance Segregation Independent Assortment
Mendel studied traits such as seed color, pod shape, and flower position but not leaf venation.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 4: Principles of Inheritance and Variation Mendel's Laws - Dominance Segregation Independent Assortment
Mendel proposed the Law of Segregation, stating that alleles separate independently during gamete formation.
Ref: NCERT Class 12 Biology Chapter 4: Principles of Inheritance and Variation Mendel's Laws - Dominance Segregation Independent Assortment
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.
Ref: Griffiths et al., Introduction to Genetic Analysis, 12th ed., Chapter 2: Mendel's Pea Model
