Inheritance

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk who was particularly important to understanding biological inheritance. He worked with ordinary pea plants to discover information about the different types of breeding. He already knew that the the plants produce pollen which is the male part of the plant and the flower which is the female part of the plant. When the two come together it is called fertilization.

__Genes and Dominance__ Using the pea plants Mendel studied seven different characteristics. He conducted them by studying two contrasting characters for each of the seven traits and studied the offspring of them. The parent plant is called P and the children plants are called F1 which stands for first filial in latin. These experiments allowed Mendel to discover two conclusions. One was that biological in heritance is determined by factors that are passed from one generation to the next. His other conclusion was the principle of dominance, which states that some alleles are dominant and others are recessive. This means that the organism with the dominant trait will always pass it on.

__Principles of Dominance__ -The inheritance of biological characteristics is determined by individual units known as genes. Genes are passed from parents to their offspring. -In cases in which two or more forms (alleles) of the gene for a single trait exist, some forms of the gene may be dominant and others may be recessive. -In most sexually reproducing organisms, each adult has two copies of each gene--one from each parent. These genes are segregated from each other when gametes are formed. -The alleles for different genes usually segregate independently of one another.

[|Mendel's Experiment Animation]

__Punnett Squares__ They are the gene combinations that might result from a genetic cross. This diagram helps to predict what the possible outcome of traits will be.