Gregor Mendel is famous for his works andexperiments with the garden pea. His findings changed the outlook of biology asthe
world knew it. But even before Mendel was curious about inheritance, aBritish farmer did his own experiment with a type of garden pea in the 1790's.When Mendel decided to repeated this experiment he did something entirely new,he counted the number of different pea plants resulting from each cross. Mendelmost likely chose to use the pea plant because they are easy to cultivate,small in size and reproduce quickly with a large amount of
offspring. Peaplants are also able to reproduce in two ways: self-fertilize andcross-fertilize. Self-fertilization is when the sperm of the flower fertilizesthe egg of the same flower. In contrast cross-fertilization occurs when pollenis exchanged by hand from oneflower to another. There are many differentvarieties of the garden pea which was an added advantage to Mendel.Mendel choseseven traits to study: flower color, seed color, seed shape, pod color, podshape, position of the flower on the stem and height of the plant. Every one tested traits had contrasting forms: plant heightcould be tall or short; flower color white or purple.The experiment can bebroken into three steps of description. First Mendel let the different peaplants self-fertilize for generations. This ensured that the plants to bestudied were of a true or pure breed, meaning their off spring would onlyproduce one form of each trait. Mendel named this
generation the parental, orP, generation for their pure breed existence. Therefore white flowered plantswould only produce white flowered off spring. Second, he cross-fertilized thetwo contrasting parental generations. He placed the pollen from the whiteflowers and placed it in the purple plant. He then collected and grew theresulting seeds, which he named the F1 generation. Mendel observed that all theoff spring had purple flowers and that none were white. Next he allowed the F1generation to self-fertilizeand grew seeds from those plants and called the offspring the F2 generation. This time around there were white and purple floweredplants. For every white flowered plant there was about 3 purple flowered.Mendel observed the same ratio of 3:1 in every trait he crossed. After studyingall of his results,Mendel made up rules summarizing his ideas of inheritance..