Mendel’s Experiments on Inheritance of Traits. Mendel used a number of visible contrasting characters of garden pea like round/wrinkled seeds, tall/short plants, white/violet flowers, etc.
Two Visible Contrasting Characters:
• Mendel took pea plants with two different characteristics such as plant with round and green seed and plant with wrinkled and yellow seeds and cross-pollinated then to get F1 progeny.
• In F1 progeny, all the plants will have round and yellow seeds. The round and yellow are dominant traits.
• Mendel then allowed F1 progeny plants for self-pollination to get F2 progeny.
• F2 progeny will have plants with round and yellow seeds, round and green seeds, wrinkled and yellow seeds, wrinkled and green seed.
• The ratio of plants with above characteristics will be 9 : 3 : 3 : 1
• Therefore, round seed/wrinkled seed trait are independently inherited.
(a) In F1 progeny, all the plants will have round and yellow seeds. Wrinkled and green traits were not seen. But wrinkled and green characters appeared in the F2 progeny. This means that wrinkle and green characters were recessive trait in F1 progeny, whereas round and yellow traits were dominant trait.
(b) New mixture of traits are seen in both F1 and F2 progeny. This means traits are independently inherited.
