Gregor Mendel Research Paper

Gregor Mendel found out that factors determine individual traits. There was no specific way to know the outcome of an offspring. He transformed art into a science by using agricultural breeding. Instead of looking at the pea plant as a whole, Mendel focused on its individual traits. Mendel concluded that each alternative form of a trait is specified by alternative forms of a gene. To follow the inheritance of genes from parent to child, Mendel first needed to be sure which genes each parent carried. Mendel reasoned that pure-bred plants must have two copies of the same gene for each trait. Pure-bred pea plants when crossed did not produce offspring with blended traits. For example, one might expect that a cross between pure-bred green-seeded …show more content…
If parents pass on both copies of a gene pair, then offspring would end up with four genes for each trait. Mendel deduced that sex cells — sperm and eggs — contain only one parental gene of each pair. Mendel found that different gene combinations from the parents resulted in specific ratios of dominant-to-recessive traits. A cross between two yellow-seed hybrids produces three times as many yellow seeds as green seeds. This is Mendel's famous 3 to 1 ratio. His abstract notion of genes was not appreciated by naturalists of his time — who had been trained primarily to observe and categorize living things. Thus, Mendel's work lay fallow until 1900, when three European scientists independently confirmed his results.Different organisms proved to have different numbers of chromosomes, suggesting that they might carry information specific for each life form. This study of the cell and chromosomal behavior was to give Mendel's abstract genetic work the physical context it needed. If cells are the fundamental units of life, they too must have a reproductive mechanism that maintains the proper chromosome number in each