gregor mendel and genetic research

• Gregor Mendel is considered the founding father of genetics and was an Austrian scientist and monk who lived in the 1800s
• Farmers had known for thousands of years that crossbreeding the best plants together could lead to more favorable offspring
• Mendel experimented with pea plants in the gardens of his monastery to study how certain traits like plant height, flower color, and pea pod color were passed on from one generation to the next
• In one experiment, Mendel crossed a green pea plant with a yellow pea plant, resulting in all yellow pea plants in the offspring
• When he crossed two of these yellow pea plants together, three-quarters of the offspring were yellow and one in every four were green
• Mendel concluded that hereditary units, which he called genes, could be dominant or recessive, with recessive traits only being expressed if the organism inherited the recessive gene from both parents
• Mendel's experiments with different traits like plant height and flower color showed the same pattern of dominant and recessive inheritance
• In the 1800s, scientists did not know about DNA or genes, and it wasn't until decades after Mendel's death that the importance of his discoveries was realized
• In the late 1800s, scientists discovered chromosomes and noticed similarities between chromosomes and the hereditary units Mendel described as genes
• In the 1950s, the double helix structure of DNA was discovered, and in 2003, the entire human genome was sequenced, revealing the complete sequence of genetic bases that make up human DNA