Gregor Johann Mendel
Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian monk in the 19th century who worked out the basic laws of inheritance through experiments with pea plants.
Gregor Johann Mendel born on July 20, 1822, Heinzendof, Silesia, Austrian Empire and died January 6, 1884, Brünn, Austria-Hungary. He was a botanist, teacher and the first person to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics, in what came to be called Mendelism.
In his monastery garden, and performed his most famous pea plant cross-breading experiment between 1856 and 1863 and on the bases of his experiment he established many of the rules of heredity. To get his declaration, Mendel performed thousands of crosses with pea plants, discovering how characteristics are passed from one generation to the next – namely, dominant and recessive traits. Mendel’s early experiments provided the basis of modern genetics.
Mendel come up with some rules found on the bases of his experiment on pea plant, these are called as laws of Mendelian inheritance.
There might be various characters in a plant those are inherited from one generation to other, but while studying pea plant mendel selected seven characters of pea plant to study for inheritance.
Characters those are studied by mendel include: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color.
Reason for choosing garden pea plant for his experiment
Garden pea plant is easy to grow in garden and several generation can be grown one by one in short duration then any other plant. This was the main reason Mendel found in pea plant.
Mendel can easily control the pollination in garden pea plant. This was the other interesting factor found by mendel and he move towards the pea plant.
High proportion of seed germination was one more reason, this is again a plus point in the study of pea plant.
Pea plant gives its new generation in very short time thus help Mendel to make his experiment fast and easy to understand.In order to trace the transmission of characters, he chose seven traits that were expressed in a distinctive manner, such as plant height (short or tall), seed color (green or yellow), seed shape (round or wrinkled)
