Name: Mendelian Laws of Inheritance
Uploaded: 2019-07-19
Duration: 6 min 52 s
Description: We acquire traits from our parents, similar to asset inheritance. How are these assets inherited, and what mechanisms govern inheritance? Let's find out in t...

Question

What are the Reasons for Mendel's Success?

Accepted Answer

Mendel started his work on pea in $1856$ and derived law of inheritance in $1865$ . Mendel used garden pea, Pisum sativum as the experimental model for his experiments, as it had the following advantages:

Pea plants consists of well-defined characters. He chose seven different contrasting characters for his study.

The pea plants have bisexual flowers.

Flower is closed typed such that self-pollination can happen.

Cross pollination can be done easily by artificial means.

Pea plant can be easily grown, economic and required small space.

Life span of pea plant is short.

The hybrids of pea plant produced by cross pollination are perfectly fertile.

The Mendel’s success was dependent the following points:

His careful selection of pea plant.

The plant did not show incomplete dominance or epistasis.

Mendel studied all the seven pairs of differing contrasting characters individually in both parent plants and then in the hybrids' offspring in different generations.

He classified the progeny plants according to their characters as dominant and recessive and also recorded the number of individuals having particular characters.

Mendel studied the inheritance of one character at a time, while his predecessors considered the organism as a whole.

He carried out experiments to second and third filial generations only.

What are the Reasons for Mendel's Success?

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