Two Pea Plants example essay topic

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk that began the scientific study of heredity more than a century ago. Today, he is known as "The Father of Genetics". He can be found on the pages of almost every biology book. Therefore, most students enrolled in the public schools of the United States study him. He is largely responsible for laying the scientific groundwork for the fields of genetics. Genetics is the branch of biology that deals with the principles of heredity and variation in related organisms.

Heredity is the transmission of genetic traits from parent to offspring. Gregor Mendel was born in Heinzendorf, Austria on July 22, 1822. He was the first person to ever trace the characteristics of successive generations of a living thing, was not a well known researcher or scientist of his day. He taught natural science to high school students. He was the second child to his parents, Anton and Rosin e Mendel. They were farmers in Brunn, Moravia.

This is how Mendel got his brilliant idea to experiment using a plant-pea plants. When Mendel was in his youth, he excelled in school. This helped gain his family's support in his desire to achieve higher education. However, his family's resources were limited in that day and time. In 1850, Mendel took the examination for certification to be a teacher, but he failed. It is weird to think that some of his lowest scores were in biology.

So Mendel was forced to enter an Augustinian monastery to continue his education and start his teaching career. Often times while trying to get through school in order to reach his level of intelligence, his whole family was forced to make sacrifices. Mendel's sacrifice was that he had to go on "half rations", which meant that he ate only half of the normal amount of food. Through everything, he was still able to become one of the top students at the school.

He studied physics, chemistry, mathematics, zoology, and botany from 1851 to 1853. However, he still never passed the teacher certification test. The turning point in Mendel's life was when he chose to change his first name from Johann to Gregor. Mendel's first presentation was on his eight years of experimentation with artificial plant hybridization. During these studies he became a member of the Zoologist-botanisher Vern in in Vienna. His first two communications were published in 1853 and 1854.

Both articles contained information about plant damage to plants by insects. "How do plants inherit different traits?" This question lead to Mendel's experiments and discoveries. Between 1856 to 1863, Mendel cultivated and tested almost 28,000 plants. His attraction to research reflected his love for nature. He was greatly interested in meteorology and many theories of evolution. He often wondered how plants obtained atypical characteristics.

On a walk, he found an ornamental plant. He then took that plant and re-planted it next to the typical variety. He grew them side- by side just to see if there would be any approximation of the traits that would be passed on through the genes from generation to generation. He designed this experiments to support and / or illustrate Lamarck's views that concerned the influence of the environment to plants.

The experiment resulted in his finding that the plants' respective offspring retained the essential traits of the parents and therefore were not influenced by the environment. Along came the birth of heredity because of this simple, but outstanding, test. His personality was also reflected by his research. Later, he repeated the experiments of a British farmer, whose name was T.A. Knight. Knight had crossed garden peas.

He crossed (mated) ones that had purple flowers with some that had white flowers. All of these offspring in this experiment had purple flowers. But, when two of the purple-flowered offspring were crossed their offspring produced both purple and white flowers. This brought the conclusion that the white flower had reappeared in the second generation of flowering pea plants.

There was some difference between Knight's experiment and the similar one that Mendel performed. The difference was that Mendel counted the number of each kind of offspring and analyzed the data that he recorded throughout the experiment. Different approaches such as those that contained measuring and counting become very popular in Europe during this time period. Therefore, Mendel was on the cutting edge of research at this time with this particular experiment.

There were many reasons that Mendel chose a good specimen to do his experiment with. (1) The garden pea has many traits that have two clearly different forms and are easy to tell apart. (Ex. Purple and White flowers-purple and white are two totally different colors). (2) The crossing of garden peas can be easily controlled because the male and female reproductive parts are enclosed in the same flower.

You can either allow the flower to fertilize itself or you can transfer the pollen to a different flower on a totally different plant. Mendel must have been very much aware of this. He crossed two pea plants by removing the stamens from the flower of one plant, then dusting the pistil of that plant with pollen from a different pea plant. This is how he controlled the mating of his garden-peas.

(3) Garden-peas are small; they grow easily, mature quickly, and produce many, many, many offspring. This is a great experiment criterion because the results can be obtained quickly and there are plenty of subjects to count. The peas that Mendel used had two basic shapes: round and wrinkled. It is found in some of his notes that the round seeds had egg cell type "A" and pollen type "A" and the wrinkled seed has an egg cell type "a". Round seeds were the dominant trait.

He did the garden-pea experiment, "for the fun of the thing". His conclusion and explanation was that hybrid germinal and pollen cells that are in their composition corresponded in equal number to all constant forms. This resulted from the combinations of traits united through fertilization. Mendel's rediscovery of his works brought a close to an era of speculation on heredity.

Genetics have developed specific terms and ways of representing an individual's genetic makeup. (Ex. Letters are frequently used to represent alleles). The first letter of the trait as a capital letter represents the dominant trait. The second letter and lowercase letters, on the other hand, represent the recessive trait.

A homozygous gene is when two of the same alleles are present in a gene. However, when two alleles of a gene are different, it is called heterozygous. The law of segregation says that the two alleles for a trait separate when gametes are formed. The law of independent assortment says that the alleles of different genes separate independently of one another during gamete formation. Also, phenotype are the traits of an organism that you can observe (tell by just looking at them) but, the genetic traits in the alleles that a person has that you cannot tell by looking at an organism is called genotype. All of these things have to do with the discoveries the Mendel made and genetics.

Without knowledge of these terms, one could not fully understand the whole picture in the study of heredity or genetics. The impact of genetic theory is no longer questionable in people's minds. Because of Mendel, his love for science, and his many great experiments, there are many diseases that are now known to be inherited. Pedigrees are typically traced to determine the probability of passing along a hereditary disease.

Plants are also now designed in labs to exhibit desired characteristics. The practical results of Mendel's research not only changed the way that people perceive the world, but also the way that people live in it.