Explain Mendel’s experiment with peas on inheritance of traits considering two visible contrasting characters.
Answers
Mendel selected garden pea for his breeding experiment because of its contrasting characters such as height of the plant, yellow or green seed, round or wrinkled seed shape. Mendel hybridized or cross-pollinated plants with alternate forms of a trait. In F2 generation all the progeny were tall as well as short plants.
Mendel's experiment
Explanation:
Mendel found that when a feature or characteristic is observable, it is the dominant trait and the other contrasting trait is recessing. So in order to prove this, he considered a pea plant which was breeding tall (TT) and dwarf (tt). He crossed these two plants. The seeds formed after fertilizing the tall and dwarf pea plants were grown. These new plants represent the first filial or F1 generation. He observed that all the F1 plants were tall.
Mendel then self-pollinated the F1 plants and observed that all plants obtained in the F2 generation were not tall. He observed that one-fourth of the F2 plants were short.
From this experiment, Mendel concluded that the F1 tall plants were not true breeding. They were carrying traits of both tall and dwarf plants. They appeared tall only because the tall trait was dominant over the dwarf trait.