Study on Mendelian Genetics and Genetic Traits
Has anyone ever wondered about Mendel’s work? How if all his experiments and research were worth it? How if his results deserve the praise from all over the years? The answer to those questions is yes. Despite not receiving any recognition when he was alive, Gregor Mendel has done many experiments to prove that he deserves all that hard-working praise.
During his years of living in a monastery, he has been working on his experiments which involved pea plants. Using them was more effective than anything else at that time because peas are small, easy to grow, and produces a large amount of offspring (Miller & Levine, 2012). In his results of cross-breeding over many generations, he discovered that certain traits show up in offspring without any blending of parent characteristics (O’Neil, 2013). Certain traits include the seed shape (round or wrinkled), the seed color (yellow or green), the color of the flower (purple or white), the pod shape (smooth or constricted), the pod color (green or yellow), the flower position (axial or terminal), and finally the plant height (tall or short) (Miller & Levine, 2012).
Now this part was a major step in his research. After cross-breeding two purebred pea plants with completely different traits, he noticed how they only had one characteristic of one of its parents. He manages to come up with two conclusions. First was “An individual’s characteristics are determined by factors that are passed from one parental generation to the next” (Miller & Levine, 2012) and now these factors are called genes. In each trait, Mendel noticed there were two different varieties. When there are different forms of a single gene, they are called alleles (Miller & Levine, 2012). Because of this conclusion, people have managed to come up with today’s basic understanding of inheritance. Without this, people wouldn’t have been able to even think about traits and genes.
The second conclusion was the principle of dominance between alleles. “Alleles are variations of a gene. We get one set of alleles (genes) from one parent and the other set of alleles from the other parent” (VOLS1, n.d.). This principle explains how some alleles are dominant and some are recessive (Miller & Levine, 2012). Organisms that have a dominant allele and a recessive allele in a gene will display the dominant allele instead of the recessive allele (Vedantu, n.d.). If the recessive was desired instead, the offspring must receive two recessive alleles from its parents (VOLS1, n.d.). This conclusion explains why people have one specific trait over the other despite having two different alleles. This conclusion also leads to another thing Mendel has discovered and researched.
People get the idea of heterozygous and homozygous from Mendel’s research. People use these terms to describe whether offspring have the same genotype or two different ones instead.
Heterozygous genotype is when the offspring inherited different alleles from its parents (Dutra, 2019). Homozygous genotype is when the same alleles are inherited from the offspring’s parents (Starboard, 2018). There are two different homozygous genotypes since both alleles could be dominant or recessive. They’re called homozygous dominant and homozygous recessive.
Mendel got this idea of heterozygous and homozygous plants while experimenting. To test this out, Mendel took yellow plants and self-bred them ten times. Since he was breeding them with themselves, assuming that it was homozygous, all the offspring would be yellow. But if it was heterozygous, he theorized that the chances of the offspring getting two green alleles would be very good out of the ten breedings (Starboard, 2018). To support this theory, he collected a great deal of data from that test. In the end, he found out that all two hundred and one plants, they all turned out yellow, meaning that the plants that he self-bred were homozygous. This theory ad]nd test proved how Mendel’s work is actually dependable.
