mendel selected garden pea for his experiment

Mendel's Experiments: The Study Of Pea Plants & Inheritance

** Gregor Mendel ** was a 19th-century pioneer of genetics who today is remembered almost entirely for two things: being a monk and relentlessly studying different traits of pea plants. Born in 1822 in Austria, Mendel was raised on a farm and attended the University of Vienna in Austria's capital city.

There, he studied science and math, a pairing that would prove invaluable to his future endeavors, which he conducted over an eight-year period entirely at the monastery where he lived.

In addition to formally studying the natural sciences in college, Mendel worked as a gardener in his youth and published research papers on the subject of crop damage by insects before taking up his now-famous work with Pisum sativum, the common pea plant. He maintained the monastery greenhouses and was familiar with the artificial fertilization techniques required to create limitless numbers of hybrid offspring.

An interesting historical footnote: While Mendel's experiments and those of the visionary biologist ** Charles Darwin ** both overlapped to a great extent, the latter never learned of Mendel's experiments.

Darwin formulated his ideas about inheritance without knowledge of Mendel's thoroughly detailed propositions about the mechanisms involved. Those propositions continue to inform the field of biological inheritance in the 21st century.

Understanding of Inheritance in the Mid-1800s

From the standpoint of basic qualifications, Mendel was perfectly positioned to make a major breakthrough in the then-all-but-nonexistent field of genetics, and he was blessed with both the environment and the patience to get done what he needed to do. Mendel would end up growing and studying nearly 29,000 pea plants between 1856 and 1863.

When Mendel first began his work with pea plants, the scientific concept of heredity was rooted in the concept of blended inheritance, which held that parental traits were somehow mixed into offspring in the manner of different-colored paints, producing a result that was not quite the mother and not quite the father every time, but that clearly resembled both.

Mendel was intuitively aware from his informal observation of plants that if there was any merit to this idea, it certainly didn't apply to the botanical world.

Mendel was not interested in the appearance of his pea plants per se. He examined them in order to understand which characteristics could be passed on to future generations and exactly how this occurred at a functional level, even if he didn't have the literal tools to see what was occurring at the molecular level.

Pea Plant Characteristics Studied

Mendel focused on the different traits, or characters, that he noticed pea plants exhibiting in a binary manner. That is, an individual plant could show either version A of a given trait or version B of that trait, but nothing in between. For example, some plants had "inflated" pea pods, whereas others looked "pinched," with no ambiguity as to which category a given plant's pods belonged in.

The seven traits Mendel identified as being useful to his aims and their different manifestations were:

• Flower color:  Purple or white. • Flower position:  Axial (along the side of the stem) or terminal (at the end of the stem). • Stem length:  Long or short. • Pod shape:  Inflated or pinched. • Pod color:  Green or yellow. • Seed shape:  Round or wrinkled. • Seed color:  Green or yellow.

Pea Plant Pollination

Pea plants can self-pollinate with no help from people. As useful as this is to plants, it introduced a complication into Mendel's work. He needed to prevent this from happening and allow only cross-pollination (pollination between different plants), since self-pollination in a plant that does not vary for a given trait does not provide helpful information.

In other words, he needed to control what characteristics could show up in the plants he bred, even if he didn't know in advance precisely which ones would manifest themselves and in what proportions.

Mendel's First Experiment

When Mendel began to formulate specific ideas about what he hoped to test and identify, he asked himself a number of basic questions. For example, what would happen when plants that were true-breeding for different versions of the same trait were cross-pollinated?

"True-breeding" means capable of producing one and only one type of offspring, such as when all daughter plants are round-seeded or axial-flowered. A true line shows no variation for the trait in question throughout a theoretically infinite number of generations, and also when any two selected plants in the scheme are bred with each other.

• To be certain his plant lines were true, Mendel spent two years creating them.

If the idea of blended inheritance were valid, blending a line of, say, tall-stemmed plants with a line of short-stemmed plants should result in some tall plants, some short plants and plants along the height spectrum in between, rather like humans. Mendel learned, however, that this did not happen at all. This was both confounding and exciting.

Mendel's Generational Assessment: P, F1, F2

Once Mendel had two sets of plants that differed only at a single trait, he performed a multigenerational assessment in an effort to try to follow the transmission of traits through multiple generations. First, some terminology:

• The parent generation was the P generation , and it included a P1 plant whose members all displayed one version of a trait and a P2 plant whose members all displayed the other version. • The hybrid offspring of the P generation was the F1 (filial) generation . • The offspring of the F1 generation was the  F2 generation  (the "grandchildren" of the P generation).

This is called a _ monohybrid cross _: "mono" because only one trait varied, and "hybrid" because offspring represented a mixture, or hybridization, of plants, as one parent has one version of the trait while one had the other version.

For the present example, this trait will be seed shape (round vs. wrinkled). One could also use flower color (white vs. purpl) or seed color (green or yellow).

Mendel's Results (First Experiment)

Mendel assessed genetic crosses from the three generations to assess the heritability of characteristics across generations. When he looked at each generation, he discovered that for all seven of his chosen traits, a predictable pattern emerged.

For example, when he bred true-breeding round-seeded plants (P1) with true-breeding wrinkled-seeded plants (P2):

• All of the plants in the F1 generation had round seeds . This seemed to suggest that the wrinkled trait had been obliterated by the round trait.  • However, he also found that, while about three-fourths of the plants in the F2 generation has round seeds, about one-fourth of these plants had wrinkled seeds . Clearly, the wrinkled trait had somehow "hidden" in the F1 generation and re-emerged in the F2 generation.

This led to the concept of dominant traits (here, round seeds) and recessive traits (in this case, wrinkled seeds).

This implied that the plants' _ phenotype (what the plants actually looked like) was not a strict reflection of their genotype _ (the information that was actually somehow coded into the plants and passed along to subsequent generations).

Mendel then produced some formal ideas to explain this phenomenon, both the mechanism of heritability and the mathematical ratio of a dominant trait to a recessive trait in any circumstance where the composition of allele pairs is known.

Mendel's Theory of Heredity

Mendel crafted a theory of heredity that consisted of four hypotheses:

1. Genes  (a gene being the chemical code for a given trait) can come in different types. 2. For each characteristic, an organism inherits one  allele  (version of a gene) from each parent. 3. When two different alleles are inherited, one may be expressed while the other is not. 4. When gametes (sex cells, which in humans are sperm cells and egg cells) are formed, the two alleles of each gene are separated.

The last of these represents the ** law of segregation **, stipulating that the alleles for each trait separate randomly into the gametes.

Today, scientists recognize that the P plants that Mendel had "bred true" were homozygous for the trait he was studying: They had two copies of the same allele at the gene in question.

Since round was clearly dominant over wrinkled, this can be represented by RR and rr, as capital letters signify dominance and lowercase letters indicate recessive traits. When both alleles are present, the trait of the dominant allele was manifested in its phenotype.

The Monohybrid Cross Results Explained

Based on the foregoing, a plant with a genotype RR at the seed-shape gene can only have round seeds, and the same is true of the Rr genotype, as the "r" allele is masked. Only plants with an rr genotype can have wrinkled seeds.

And sure enough, the four possible combinations of genotypes (RR, rR, Rr and rr) yield a 3:1 phenotypic ratio, with about three plants with round seeds for every one plant with wrinkled seeds.

Because all of the P plants were homozygous, RR for the round-seed plants and rr for the wrinkled-seed plants, all of the F1 plants could only have the genotype Rr. This meant that while all of them had round seeds, they were all carriers of the recessive allele, which could therefore appear in subsequent generations thanks to the law of segregation.

This is precisely what happened. Given F1 plants that all had an Rr genotype, their offspring (the F2 plants) could have any of the four genotypes listed above. The ratios were not exactly 3:1 owing to the randomness of the gamete pairings in fertilization, but the more offspring that were produced, the closer the ratio came to being exactly 3:1.

Mendel's Second Experiment

Next, Mendel created _ dihybrid crosses _, wherein he looked at two traits at once rather than just one. The parents were still true-breeding for both traits, for example, round seeds with green pods and wrinkled seeds with yellow pods, with green dominant over yellow. The corresponding genotypes were therefore RRGG and rrgg.

As before, the F1 plants all looked like the parent with both dominant traits. The ratios of the four possible phenotypes in the F2 generation (round-green, round-yellow, wrinkled-green, wrinkled-yellow) turned out to be 9:3:3:1

This bore out Mendel's suspicion that different traits were inherited independently of one another, leading him to posit the ** law of independent assortment **. This principle explains why you might have the same eye color as one of your siblings, but a different hair color; each trait is fed into the system in a manner that is blind to all of the others.

Linked Genes on Chromosomes

Today, we know the real picture is a little more complicated, because in fact, genes that happen to be physically close to each other on chromosomes can be inherited together thanks to chromosome exchange during gamete formation.

In the real world, if you looked at limited geographical areas of the U.S., you would expect to find more New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox fans in close proximity than either Yankees-Los Angeles Dodgers fans or Red Sox-Dodgers fans in the same area, because Boston and New York are close together and both are close to 3,000 miles from Los Angeles.

Mendelian Inheritance

As it happens, not all traits obey this pattern of inheritance. But those that do are called Mendelian traits . Returning to the dihybrid cross mentioned above, there are sixteen possible genotypes:

RRGG, RRgG, RRGg, RRgg, RrGG, RrgG, RrGg, Rrgg, rRGG, rRgG, rRGg, rRgg, rrGG, rrGg, rrgG, rrgg

When you work out the phenotypes, you see that the probability ratio of

round green, round yellow, wrinkled green, wrinkled yellow

turns out to be 9:3:3:1. Mendel's painstaking counting of his different plant types revealed that the ratios were close enough to this prediction for him to conclude that his hypotheses were correct.

• Note: A genotype of rR is functionally equivalent to Rr. The only difference is which parent contributes which allele to the mix.

• Scitable by Nature Education: Gregor Mendel and the Principles of Inheritance
• Biology LibreTexts: Mendel's Pea Plants
• OpenText BC: Concepts of Biology: Laws of Inheritance
• Forbes Magazine: How Mendel Channeled Darwin

Cite This Article

Beck, Kevin. "Mendel's Experiments: The Study Of Pea Plants & Inheritance" sciencing.com , https://www.sciencing.com/mendels-experiments-the-study-of-pea-plants-inheritance-13718433/. 8 May 2019.

Beck, Kevin. (2019, May 8). Mendel's Experiments: The Study Of Pea Plants & Inheritance. sciencing.com . Retrieved from https://www.sciencing.com/mendels-experiments-the-study-of-pea-plants-inheritance-13718433/

Beck, Kevin. Mendel's Experiments: The Study Of Pea Plants & Inheritance last modified August 30, 2022. https://www.sciencing.com/mendels-experiments-the-study-of-pea-plants-inheritance-13718433/

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Mendel's Pea Garden

When looking for something to experiment with, Mendel turned to what was already available in his own backyard: the common pea plant.

The pea plant was perfect for Mendel's experiments for a number of reasons. First, pea plants were easy to grow and could be grown quickly in large numbers.

Second, the shape of the flowers made it easy to control which plants were being mated.

In flowering plants, male reproductive cells called pollen are created and stored on the anther. The female reproductive cells are created and stored in the ovary. When pollen touches the stigma, it falls through a tube and into the ovary. Here, it combines with female reproductive cells which begin to grow into seeds.

Mendel controlled breeding by separating the male and female parts of the flowers so they couldn't reproduce on their own. Next, he used a small brush to move pollen between plants.

Lastly, pea plants had a number of visible traits, called phenotypes, that were easy to identify. The inner pea color, for example, could be either green or yellow.

At first glance, pea plants might seem to have very little in common with animals or human beings. A closer look into the inside of the cell, however, will show you that the way that genes and chromosomes work is extremely similar in all living things. The same rules that determine how traits like pea color are passed down from parent to offspring also determine how traits like freckles or dimples are passed down in humans.

Parent Generation

Mendel began his experiments with true breeding strains, meaning groups of plants that pass down only one phenotype to their offspring. These true breeding strains were created by mating plants with the same traits for many generations.

First Generation

Mendel mated two different true breeding strains together, a green pea strain and a yellow pea strain, to see what phenotype the first generation of offspring would have. When Mendel looked at the offspring, called the F1 (or first) generation, he saw that every single one of the plants had yellow seeds.

Second Generation

Next, Mendel took the first generation plants and mated them with each other. What color seeds would you expect the next generation to have? To Mendel’s surprise, 25% of the offspring, called the F2 (or second) generation, actually had green seeds, even though all of the F1 parent plants had yellow seeds!

This result led Mendel to believe that it was possible for a trait to be present, but not visible, in an individual. Something from the original green parent plants was skipping a generation and being passed to the grandchildren. Mendel repeated this experiment with many different characteristics. He tested inner pea color, outer pea color, pea shape, flower position, stem length, unripe pod color, and pod shape. He had similar results every single time.

How is this possible? Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening on a genetic level with the help of a Punnett Square .

Additional images via Wikimedia Commons. Pea plant flower via AnRo0002. Purple sweet pea flower taken by  Giligone .

Read more about: Solving a Genetic Mystery

• Human Traits
• Chromosomes and Genes
• Mendel’s Garden
• Punnett Squares

Bibliographic details:

• Article: Mendel’s Garden
• Author(s): Dr. Biology
• Publisher: Arizona State University School of Life Sciences Ask A Biologist
• Site name: ASU - Ask A Biologist
• Date published: 20 Jul, 2010
• Date accessed:

Dr. Biology. (Tue, 07/20/2010 - 11:52). Mendel’s Garden. ASU - Ask A Biologist. Retrieved from https://askabiologist.asu.edu/mendel-garden

Chicago Manual of Style

Mla 2017 style.

The shape of pea flowers helped Mendel control breeding of the plants for his experiments.

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• Biology Article
• Mendel Laws Of Inheritance

Mendel's Laws of Inheritance

Inheritance can be defined as the process of how a child receives genetic information from the parent. The whole process of heredity is dependent upon inheritance and it is the reason that the offsprings are similar to the parents. This simply means that due to inheritance, the members of the same family possess similar characteristics.

It was only during the mid 19th century that people started to understand inheritance in a proper way. This understanding of inheritance was made possible by a scientist named Gregor Mendel, who formulated certain laws to understand inheritance known as Mendel’s laws of inheritance.

Table of Contents

Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance

Why was pea plant selected for mendel’s experiments, mendel’s experiments, conclusions from mendel’s experiments, mendel’s laws, key points on mendel’s laws.

Between 1856-1863, Mendel conducted the hybridization experiments on the garden peas. During that period, he chose some distinct characteristics of the peas and conducted some cross-pollination/ artificial pollination on the pea lines that showed stable trait inheritance and underwent continuous self-pollination. Such pea lines are called true-breeding pea lines.

Also Refer:   Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance: Mendel’s Contribution

He selected a pea plant for his experiments for the following reasons:

• The pea plant can be easily grown and maintained.
• They are naturally self-pollinating but can also be cross-pollinated.
• It is an annual plant, therefore, many generations can be studied within a short period of time.
• It has several contrasting characters.

Mendel conducted 2 main experiments to determine the laws of inheritance. These experiments were:

Monohybrid Cross

Dihybrid cross.

While experimenting, Mendel found that certain factors were always being transferred down to the offspring in a stable way. Those factors are now called genes i.e. genes can be called the units of inheritance.

Mendel experimented on a pea plant and considered 7 main contrasting traits in the plants. Then, he conducted both experiments to determine the inheritance laws. A brief explanation of the two experiments is given below.

In this experiment, Mendel took two pea plants of opposite traits (one short and one tall) and crossed them. He found the first generation offspring were tall and called it F1 progeny. Then he crossed F1 progeny and obtained both tall and short plants in the ratio 3:1. To know more about this experiment, visit Monohybrid Cross – Inheritance Of One Gene .

Mendel even conducted this experiment with other contrasting traits like green peas vs yellow peas, round vs wrinkled, etc. In all the cases, he found that the results were similar. From this, he formulated the laws of Segregation And Dominance .

In a dihybrid cross experiment, Mendel considered two traits, each having two alleles. He crossed wrinkled-green seed and round-yellow seeds and observed that all the first generation progeny (F1 progeny) were round-yellow. This meant that dominant traits were the round shape and yellow colour.

He then self-pollinated the F1 progeny and obtained 4 different traits: round-yellow, round-green, wrinkled-yellow, and wrinkled-green seeds in the ratio 9:3:3:1.

Check Dihybrid Cross and Inheritance of Two Genes to know more about this cross.

After conducting research for other traits, the results were found to be similar. From this experiment, Mendel formulated his second law of inheritance i.e. law of Independent Assortment.

• The genetic makeup of the plant is known as the genotype. On the contrary, the physical appearance of the plant is known as phenotype.
• The genes are transferred from parents to the offspring in pairs known as alleles.
• During gametogenesis when the chromosomes are halved, there is a 50% chance of one of the two alleles to fuse with the allele of the gamete of the other parent.
• When the alleles are the same, they are known as homozygous alleles and when the alleles are different they are known as heterozygous alleles.

Also Refer:   Mendelian Genetics

The two experiments lead to the formulation of Mendel’s laws known as laws of inheritance which are:

• Law of Dominance
• Law of Segregation
• Law of Independent Assortment

This is also called Mendel’s first law of inheritance. According to the law of dominance, hybrid offspring will only inherit the dominant trait in the phenotype. The alleles that are suppressed are called the recessive traits while the alleles that determine the trait are known as the dominant traits.

The law of segregation states that during the production of gametes, two copies of each hereditary factor segregate so that offspring acquire one factor from each parent. In other words, allele (alternative form of the gene) pairs segregate during the formation of gamete and re-unite randomly during fertilization. This is also known as Mendel’s third law of inheritance.

Also known as Mendel’s second law of inheritance, the law of independent assortment states that a pair of traits segregates independently of another pair during gamete formation. As the individual heredity factors assort independently, different traits get equal opportunity to occur together.

• The law of inheritance was proposed by Gregor Mendel after conducting experiments on pea plants for seven years.
• Mendel’s laws of inheritance include law of dominance, law of segregation and law of independent assortment.
• The law of segregation states that every individual possesses two alleles and only one allele is passed on to the offspring.
• The law of independent assortment states that the inheritance of one pair of genes is independent of inheritance of another pair.

Also Read:   Non-Mendelian Inheritance

Stay tuned with BYJU’S to learn more about Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance. You can also download the BYJU’S app for further reference on Mendel’s laws.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three laws of inheritance proposed by mendel.

The three laws of inheritance proposed by Mendel include:

Which is the universally accepted law of inheritance?

Law of segregation is the universally accepted law of inheritance. It is the only law without any exceptions. It states that each trait consists of two alleles which segregate during the formation of gametes and one allele from each parent combines during fertilization.

Why is the law of segregation known as the law of purity of gametes?

The law of segregation is known as the law of purity of gametes because a gamete carries only a recessive or a dominant allele but not both the alleles.

Why was the pea plant used in Mendel’s experiments?

Mendel picked pea plants in his experiments because the pea plant has different observable traits. It can be grown easily in large numbers and its reproduction can be manipulated. Also, pea has both male and female reproductive organs, so they can self-pollinate as well as cross-pollinate.

What was the main aim of Mendel’s experiments?

The main aim of Mendel’s experiments was:

• To determine whether the traits would always be recessive.
• Whether traits affect each other as they are inherited.
• Whether traits could be transformed by DNA.

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very nice. it is the best to study about genetics

Genetic inheritance is so interesting

It helped me a lot Thanks

It is so amazing thanks a lot

Superb, it’s interesting.

It is very useful becoz all details explain in simple manner with examples

AWESOME, the above notes are fabulous

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It helped me alot

If Mendel gave three law the what is the law of unit of characters and who proposed this law . Please clear my doubt a little bit faster , it is little important for me.

The Law of unit characters was proposed by Mendel. He explained that the inheritance of a trait is controlled by unit characters or factors, which are passed from parents to offspring through the gametes. These factors are now known as genes. Each factor exists in pairs, which are known as alleles.

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Mendel’s experiments.

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Mendel is known as the father of genetics because of his ground-breaking work on inheritance in pea plants 150 years ago.

Gregor Johann Mendel was a monk and teacher with interests in astronomy and plant breeding. He was born in 1822, and at 21, he joined a monastery in Brünn (now in the Czech Republic). The monastery had a botanical garden and library and was a centre for science, religion and culture . In 1856, Mendel began a series of experiments at the monastery to find out how traits are passed from generation to generation. At the time, it was thought that parents’ traits were blended together in their progeny .

Studying traits in peas

Mendel studied inheritance in peas ( Pisum sativum ). He chose peas because they had been used for similar studies, are easy to grow and can be sown each year. Pea flowers contain both male and female parts, called stamen and stigma , and usually self-pollinate. Self-pollination happens before the flowers open, so progeny are produced from a single plant.

Peas can also be cross-pollinated by hand, simply by opening the flower buds to remove their pollen-producing stamen (and prevent self-pollination) and dusting pollen from one plant onto the stigma of another.

Traits in pea plants

Mendel followed the inheritance of 7 traits in pea plants, and each trait had 2 forms. He identified pure-breeding pea plants that consistently showed 1 form of a trait after generations of self-pollination.

Mendel then crossed these pure-breeding lines of plants and recorded the traits of the hybrid progeny. He found that all of the first-generation (F1) hybrids looked like 1 of the parent plants. For example, all the progeny of a purple and white flower cross were purple (not pink, as blending would have predicted). However, when he allowed the hybrid plants to self-pollinate, the hidden traits would reappear in the second-generation (F2) hybrid plants.

Dominant and recessive traits

Mendel described each of the trait variants as dominant or recessive Dominant traits, like purple flower colour, appeared in the F1 hybrids, whereas recessive traits, like white flower colour, did not.

Mendel did thousands of cross-breeding experiments. His key finding was that there were 3 times as many dominant as recessive traits in F2 pea plants (3:1 ratio).

Traits are inherited independently

Mendel also experimented to see what would happen if plants with 2 or more pure-bred traits were cross-bred. He found that each trait was inherited independently of the other and produced its own 3:1 ratio. This is the principle of independent assortment.

Find out more about Mendel’s principles of inheritance .

The next generations

Mendel didn’t stop there – he continued to allow the peas to self-pollinate over several years whilst meticulously recording the characteristics of the progeny. He may have grown as many as 30,000 pea plants over 7 years.

Mendel’s findings were ignored

In 1866, Mendel published the paper Experiments in plant hybridisation ( Versuche über plflanzenhybriden ). In it, he proposed that heredity is the result of each parent passing along 1 factor for every trait. If the factor is dominant , it will be expressed in the progeny. If the factor is recessive, it will not show up but will continue to be passed along to the next generation. Each factor works independently from the others, and they do not blend.

The science community ignored the paper, possibly because it was ahead of the ideas of heredity and variation accepted at the time. In the early 1900s, 3 plant biologists finally acknowledged Mendel’s work. Unfortunately, Mendel was not around to receive the recognition as he had died in 1884.

Useful links

Download a translated version of Mendel’s 1866 paper Experiments in plant hybridisation from Electronic Scholarly Publishing.

This apple cross-pollination video shows scientists at Plant & Food Research cross-pollinating apple plants.

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​Mendel, Johann (Gregor)

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk in the 19th century who worked out the basic laws of inheritance through experiments with pea plants. In his monastery garden, Mendel performed thousands of crosses with pea plants, discovering how characteristics are passed down from one generation to the next — namely, dominant and recessive traits. Mendel’s early experiments provided the basis of modern genetics.

Johann Gregor Mendel. We now know that Mendel's modes of inheritance, specifically dominant and recessive, using single genes are only one of the few ways that genes can influence traits. While Mendel's fundamental findings are extremely important, the inheritance of many, many traits is much more complicated.

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