how do mendel experiments show that traits are inherited indenpendently?
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Answer:
Mendel worked on pea plants, but his principles apply to traits in plants and animals – they can explain how we inherit our eye colour, hair colour and even tongue-rolling ability.
Mendel followed the inheritance of 7 traits in pea plants (Pisum sativum). He chose traits that had 2 forms:
Pea shape (round or wrinkled)
Pea colour (yellow or green)
Flower colour (purple or white)
Flower position (terminal or axial)
Plant height (tall or short)
Pod shape (inflated or constricted)
Pod colour (yellow or green).
Mendel began with pure-breeding pea plants because they always produced progeny with the same characteristics as the parent plant. Mendel cross-bred these pea plants and recorded the traits of their progeny over several generations.
Mendel observed that, when peas with more than one trait were crossed, the progeny did not always match the parents. This is because different traits are inherited independently – this is the principle of independent assortment. For example, he cross-bred pea plants with round, yellow seeds and plants with wrinkled, green seeds. Only the dominant traits (yellow and round) appeared in the F1 progeny, but all combinations of trait were seen in the self-pollinated F2 progeny. The traits were present in a 9:3:3:1 ratio (round, yellow: round, green: wrinkled, yellow: wrinkled, green).