The Story Behind Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance

Mendel’s laws of inheritance are a set of fundamental principles that describe how traits are passed down from one generation to the next. The story begins in the mid-19th century when Gregor Mendel, Father of genetics, a monk living in a monastery in Brno (now in the Czech Republic), conducted a series of experiments with pea plants. 

Mendel was curious about how traits are passed from one generation to another. But why only pea plants for the experiment? Because they were easily available, easy to grow, and had easily observable traits, such as seed color, flower color, and pod shape. His involved crossing pea plants with different traits and observing the traits of their offspring. He then analyzed the results of these crosses and derived a set of fundamental principles that described how traits were inherited and published his findings in 1866 in a paper called “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,” but his work was largely ignored at the time. The three laws of inheritance are:

1. Law of Segregation: This law states that each individual organism possesses two copies (alleles) of each gene, one inherited from each parent, meaning that each parent gives one copy of their traits to their child.
2. Law of independent assortment: This law states that genes for different traits are passed down separately from each other.
3. Law of dominance: This law states that one gene is more dominant than the other. 

Overall, these rules help us understand how we inherit traits from our parents, and why we look similar or different from them.

We never wonder why Lion can give birth to Lions only, or why a bird can reproduce in the same species and no other species. Not everything is possible, Isn’t it?  Also, No human being look exactly identical, even with twins there are differences in every individual. Some siblings look similar while at the same time, some look really different. 

Have you ever thought about who causes all these differences? All these questions are answered in the branch of science named Genetics. In this article, we will know more about the Inheritance of one gene.