Simple Mendelian genetics crossses

344 views · Published 20 February 2014 · 5:54 · Indexed 30 September 2026

Channel: Nikolay's Genetics Lessons · 2014 · Education

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Mendelian inheritance is a set of rules about genetic inheritance.

Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics.
The basic rules of genetics were first discovered by a monk named Gregor Mendel in the 1850s, and published in 1866. For thousands of years, people had noticed how traits are inherited from parents to their children. However, Mendel's work was different because he did experiments on plants, and designed those experiments very carefully.

In his experiments, Mendel studied how traits were passed on in pea plants. He started his crosses with plants that bred true, and counted characters that were either/or in nature (either tall or short). He bred large numbers of plants, and expressed his results numerically. He used test crosses to reveal the presence and proportion of recessive characters.
Limitations
Mendel's laws apply widely, but not to all living things. They apply to any organism which is diploid (has two paired sets of chromosomes) and which engages in sexual reproduction. They would not apply to bacteria, for example, or to asexual reproduction. They do apply to the great majority of plants and animals.

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