Mendel's Experiments
Mendel was primarily a monk in a monastery. In addition to his normal duties of preaching in the church, Mendel evinced a keen interest in the maintenance of the garden in the premises of the church.
In the course of his routine rounds in the garden, Mendel was keenly observing the pattern of inheritance of certain characters in some of the plants.
He became interested in investigating the mechanism by which the characters are transferred from the parent plants to their offspring.
He decided to conduct some experiments in this direction. After careful examination and thinking, Mendel selected the pea plants (Pisum sativum) for his experiments.
In the pea plants, Mendel found certain clear advantages such as:
- Under natural conditions the pea plants exhibited only self-pollination. This is because the flowers exhibit a condition called cliestogamy (petals remain closed). - Every pea plant produced a large number of seeds.
- The duration of life cycle in the pea plants was very short.
- It was possible to conduct cross pollination by transferring pollen grains from one plant to another.
The following table represents the contrasting characters, which Mendel was able to identify in the pea plants.
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