An Augustinian monk and Austrian scientist, and the founder of modern genetics. Mendel was born into a German-speaking family in the Silesian part of the Austrian Empire, now part of the Czech Republic. Mendel's experiments on pea plants, conducted between 1856 and 1863, established many of the rules of inheritance, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian genetics.

Mendel studied seven traits of pea plants: plant height, fruit shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. Mendel used seed color as an example for pea plants, demonstrating that when purebred yellow peas were crossed with purebred green peas, the resulting offspring always had yellow seeds.

The result of the previous cross shows that the second generation had green peas at a ratio of one green to three yellow peas. Mendel explained this phenomenon when he coined the terms "recessive" and "dominant" to refer to certain traits, meaning that the green trait that had disappeared in the first generation had recessive and been replaced by the yellow trait.

The significance of Mendel's work was not revealed until the early 20th century (more than three decades after its appearance) with the rediscovery of his laws. Erich von Tschirmak, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and William Jasper Spielmann independently verified many of Mendel's experimental findings, ushering in the modern era of genetics.

Experiments on Plant Hybridization

Mendel, known as the "Father of Modern Genetics," was inspired by his professors at the Universities of Palackås and Olomouc (Friedrich Franz and Johann Karl Nestler) and his colleagues at the monastery (such as Franz Dippel) to study plant variation. Mendel began his experiments on edible pea plants in 1856.

After conducting preliminary experiments on pea plants, Mendel settled on studying seven traits that appeared to be inherited from other traits. He focused first on seed shape, which was either angular or round. Mendel conducted studies on 28,000 plants he had grown, most of them peas, between 1856 and 1863.

These studies demonstrated that when different purebred varieties (tall, fertile plants) were crossed with short plants, the second generation produced plants in which one out of four of the traits was recessive, one was dominant, and two were hybrids. All these studies led to the development of what are known as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.