mendel

• Gregor Mendel

  Considered the founding father of genetics, an Austrian scientist and monk who lived in the 1800s
• By the 1800s, farmers had already known for thousands of years that crossbreeding the best plants together could lead to more favorable offspring, but nobody understood how it worked
• Mendel's experiments with pea plants

  1. Took a green pea plant with green pods and a yellow pea plant with yellow pods

  2. Crossed the two plants together

  3. Offspring were all yellow pea plants

  4. Took two of the yellow offspring plants and crossed them

  5. Three quarters of the offspring were yellow, one in every four were green
• Hereditary units

  What Mendel called the things being passed on from one generation to the next, which could be dominant or recessive
• Mendel did the same experiments with other traits like plant height and flower color, and found the same pattern of dominant and recessive hereditary units
• In the 1800s, scientists didn't know about DNA or genes
• Scientists discovered chromosomes and observed their behaviour during cell division

  Late 1800s
• Scientists noticed similarities between chromosomes and Mendel's hereditary units, and came up with the idea that these units (now called genes) were on the chromosomes

  Early 1900s
• Discovery of the double helix structure of DNA

  1950s
• Sequencing of the entire human genome

  2003