BIOLOGY

Lesson 12.1:
The Work of Gregor
Mendel
 OBJECTIVES:
1. Describe how an organism gets
its unique characteristics.
2. Explain how different forms of a
gene are distributed to
offspring.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS
➢ Every living thing has a set of characteristics inherited
from its parent or parents.
➢ Genetics: scientific study of biological inheritance.
➢ Who is Gregor Mendel?
○ Austrian scientist and priest who was born in 1822.
○ Mendel studied science and math at the university
of Vienna and spent the next 14 years working in a
monastery and teaching.
○ At the monastery, he was in charge of the garden, which allowed
him to do the work that changed biology forever.
○ Mendel carried out his work with ordinary garden peas because
peas are small, easy to grow, and can produce hundreds of
offspring--- peas were Mendel’s “model system”.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS
➢ Role of Fertilization
○ Mendel knew that part of each flower
produces pollen grains containing male
reproductive cells or sperm.
○ The female portion of each flower
produces reproductive cells called
eggs.
○ Fertilization: joining of male and female
reproductive cells to produce a new
cell.
■ In peas, the new cell develops into
a tiny embryo encased within a
seed.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS

➢ Role of Fertilization (continued)

○ Pea flowers are mostly self-pollinating, so egg cells are fertilized
by sperm within the same flower.
■ Since a plant grown from a single parent via self-pollination
inherits all of the characteristics of the parent.
■ “True breeding” plants: means that they were self-pollinating
and produced offspring with traits identical to themselves.
● Trait: specific characteristic, like seed color or plant
height
■ One stock of Mendel’s seeds produced only tall plants, while
another produced only short ones. One produced only green
seeds, another produced only yellow seeds.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS

➢ Role of Fertilization (continued)

○ Mendel decided to “cross” his stocks of “true-breeding” plants to
learn how those traits were determined.
■ “Crossing” meant he caused one plant to reproduce with another
plant--- he prevented self-pollination by cutting away the pollen-
bearing male parts of a flower and dusted pollen from a different
plant onto the female part of that flower (cross-pollination).
■ This allowed Mendel
to cross both plants
with different traits
and study the results.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS

➢ Role of Fertilization (continued)

○ Mendel studied seven different traits of pea plants.
■ Hybrids: offspring of crosses between parents with different
contrasting characteristics.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS

➢ Genes and Alleles

○ P1= parental generation--- original pair of plants
○ F1= first filial generation--- offspring of original parents
■ Filius and filia are Latin for “son” and “daughter”
○ In Mendel’s cross, the F1 hybrid plants had the characteristics of only
one of its parents.
■ In each cross, the traits of the other parents seemed to have
disappeared.
○ Mendel drew two conclusions:
■ Conclusion 1: An individual’s characteristics are determined by
factors that are passed from one parental generation to the next-
-- these factors are called genes.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS

➢ Genes and Alleles (continued)

○ Mendel’s conclusions (continued)
■ Each of the traits Mendel studied were controlled by a
single gene in two contrasting varieties, producing
different forms of each trait--- these are called alleles.
➢ Dominant & Recessive Alleles
○ Conclusion 2: some alleles are dominant and others are
recessive; An organism with both a dominant allele and a
recessive allele for a particular trait will exhibit the
dominant characteristic--- this is the Principle of
Dominance
 SEGREGATION

➢ Mendel had another question: Had the recessive alleles

simply disappeared, or were they still present in the new
plants?
○ To find out, he allowed all 7 kinds of F1 hybrids to self-
pollinate.
○ F2 generation (second filial): cross of the F1 generation.
○ Mendel discovered that the traits produced by the
recessive alleles reappeared in the second generation.
■ Roughly ¼ of the F2 plant showed the trait controlled
by the recessive allele.
● Why did the recessive alleles seem to disappear
in the F1 generation, only to reappear in the F2
generation?
SEGREGATION
 SEGREGATION

➢ Explaining the F1 Cross

○ The reappearance of the recessive allele indicated that at some
point, the allele for yellow pods had separated from the allele for
green pods--- called segregation.
○ How did this separation, or segregation, occur?
■ Mendel suggested that the alleles for green pods and yellow
pods in the F1 plants must have segregated from each other
during the formation of gametes (reproductive cells).
➢ The Formation of Gametes
○ During gamete formation, the alleles for each gene segregate
from each other so that each gamete carries only one allele for
each gene.
 SEGREGATION
➢ The Formation of Gametes (continued)
○ Each F1 plant produces two kinds of
gametes--- those with green pod allele and
those with yellow pod allele.
■ A capital letter represents a dominant allele.
■ A lowercase letter represents recessive
alleles.
■ Whenever a gamete that carried the g allele paired with another
gamete with the g allele to produce an F2 plant, that plant had
yellow pods.
■ Every time one or both gametes of the pairing carried the G
allele, a plant with green pods was produced. The genes had
been reshuffled to produce new combinations of alleles.