Mendel's Contributions to Genetics and Inheritance

Introduction

Biologist, Gregor Johann Mendel, discovered how traits passed from one generation to the next. Mendel studied and used pea plants to discover the principles that rule heredity. He found that each parent, father, and mother pass down traits to their offspring, who inherit different combinations of their recessive or dominant alleles-terms introduced by Mendel during the 19th century. Mendel introduced important principles teaching us that recessive traits will only be shown in the phenotype if both alleles are recessive. Mendel’s laws of inheritance include the Law of segregation and the Law of independent assortment.

In the 19th century, Mendel’s relatively new science of inheritance and hereditary has increasingly developed into what we commonly understand today as genetics. Peter J. Bowler describes this field as becoming “a very active area of scientific research”.

The Hardy-Weinberg principle states that throughout generations, genetic variation will remain constant if kept from the presence of disturbing influences. The principle can be described as an idealized or equilibrium state. Due to the fact that in nature, genetic mutations and the environment certainly impact the genetic variation of a system.

Background

The exercise involved a series of ‘mating’ events resulting in 6 generations. Each mating event produced offspring with ‘possible’ newly inherited traits. The idea of ‘chance’ was included through simple coin tosses. Also, ideas of selection and mutations were introduced into the ‘gene pool’, which presented a deeper and more clear understanding of Mendelian inheritance and the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Upon reaching the third generation, A B1 mutant allele was introduced to the blue locus-influencing fin shape and a G1 mutant allele was introduced to the green locus-influencing Mouth