Genetics was invented by scientist Johann Gregor Mendel. Based on his research and experimentation, he came up with the Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance. He was born in 1822, and this year is his 200th birthday, so let’s celebrate! The summer Mendel Festival in 2022 will honour him in the city of Brno, where he worked. The festival will combine fun, religion, and science. It will occur between July 20 and July 24.
Gregor Mendel discovered the basic principles of heredity through experiments with pea plants, long before the discovery of DNA and genes. Mendel was an Augustinian monk at St Thomas’s Abbey near Brünn (now Brno, in the Czech Republic). He studied natural sciences and mathematics at the University of Vienna, Austria, but twice failed to obtain a teaching certificate, instead becoming a part-time assistant teacher and carrying out research in plant breeding.
Approximately 10,000 pea plants were grown for his most well-known studies, which were carried out between 1857 and 1864. Being hermaphrodites, pea plants often fertilise themselves and have both male and female sex cells. By applying pollen with a paintbrush to the plants, Mendel was able to cross-breed them. Each plant’s height, pod shape, pea form, and colour were among the details he scrupulously recorded. These traits persisted in the offspring of plants that self-fertilized.
At the time, it was commonly accepted that heredity produced offspring with diluted traits by fusing the traits of the parents. Mendel demonstrated that when two purebred plant varieties crossbreed, the progeny resembled one of the parents more than the other, not a mixture of the two. He found that some traits are dominant and would always be expressed in a first generation cross, while others are recessive and would not appear in this generation. However, these recessive traits re-appear in the next generation if these first-generation plants self-fertilise.
Three scientists independently endorsed his work in 1900, but it took another 30 years for his findings to become widely acknowledged. Ronald Fisher and other evolutionary scientists realised that Mendel’s principles of heredity could then be used to explain how natural selection may cause advantageous characteristics to become more frequent and eliminate unfavourable ones. His contributions were a component of ‘the modern synthesis,’ a revision of Darwin’s theories based on advances in genetics.
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