Wanderer Archive
Gregor Mendel (1830-1860s)
Gregor Mendel, the scientist who wrote Mendel’s laws of inheritence. He was a genetist who studied the forms of inheritence through the experimentation of pea plants (he was weird). He determined that traits depend on separate factors from parents to offspring.
He looked at characteristics; colour, shapes, seeds etc.
2 alleles controlling one trait. E.g. either smooth or wrinkled leaves. You use punnett squares to find the probabilities of these with both of the parent genotypes.
Ok, moving on to the actual laws.
There’s the law of segregation, which means that the offspring receive two alleles, one from each parent. Dominant alleles will mask recessive alleles. These two factors separate during meiosis, and alternate variations of the allele cause different characteristics.
The law of independent assortment, which means that the inheritence of an allele is affected by nothing, and that it is pure luck.
The law of dominance, which means that dominant alleles are expressed over recessive ones, and the law of recessiveness which is the opposite.