Gregor Mendel

Although he received little recognition during his lifetime, Gregor Mendel The methodical monk who paved the way for GENETICS By the way… After my death, my work was forgotten and not rediscovered until 1900. Gregor Mendel’s experiments with pea plants launched the science of genetics.

Scientific monk

Gregor Mendel studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy before joining a monastery in 1843, aged 21. More interested in science than religion, he began EXPERIMENTING WITH

PEA PLANTS in the monastery’s garden. For thousands of years, people had bred animals and plants to produce offspring with the best traits, or features, but it was unreliable. Mendel wanted to find out how physical characteristics were passed down the generations.

Who came after…

In 1869, Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher discovered an acid in the nuclei of red blood cells, now called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). Naming it nuclein, he proposed it might be the basis of heredity (the transfer of features from parents to offspring). Genes are made of DNA. Danish biologist WilhelM

Johannsen coined the word gene in 1909 to describe the inheritance factors that

Mendel had described. The word came from the Greek word genos, meaning birth.

Flower position

Purple is dominant so more flowers are this colour. Mendel focused on seven pea plant traits: flower position and colour, plant height, pea shape and colour, and pod shape and colour. When he crossbred purple- and whiteflowered plants, the OFFSPRING had purple flowers, but when he bred purple offspring with each other to create a new generation, some white flowers appeared again.

Parent plants

Each offspring has a set of instructions from each parent plant.

How the set of instructions mix determines the colour.

Did you know? Mendel grew about 30,000 pea plants, methodically recording all his results.

Inheritance laws

Mendel coined the terms dominant and recessive. He realized that each trait was controlled by a pair of FACTORS (now known as genes), one from each parent. The gene for purple flowers is dominant over the recessive gene for white flowers. For white flowers to appear, the offspring must inherit the recessive gene from both parents.

How he changed the world

Before Mendel’s work, nobody understood how traits were inherited. His experiments showed that they followed particular laws, now called Mendel’s Laws.

In 1944, biologists Maclyn

Mccarty, Oswald avery, and cOlin MacleOd provided the first evidence that the genetic material of living cells is made of DNA. One of the most important genetic ideas was unveiled in 2013 by Chinese-American scientist

Feng Zhang. His gene-editing tool allows scientists to edit DNA in order to repair the faulty genes that cause diseases.