Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk and biologist to used the technique of artificial pollination to discover the rules of heredity. Mendel is often recognised as the ‘father of modern genetics’ due to his contributions to today’s understanding of inheritance.
Through artificially pollinating pea plants growing in his garden, Gregor Mendel observed certain patterns of inheritance through passing generations. Between 1856 and 1863, he cross pollinated numerous pea plants with different physical characteristics and tracked the inherited traits throughout several generations. The physical characteristics he examined within each successive generation of pea plants included plant height, pod shape, pod colour, seed shape, seed colour, pod colour and flower colour. By cross pollinating pea plants with different combinations of these traits, Mendel noticed certain mathematical patterns of inheritance. From his observations of these patterns, Mendel concluded that: offspring outwardly express only one of the two alleles (variations of a gene) they inherit from their parents. The allele that is expressed is termed the dominant allele while the other allele that isn’t expressed but only carried is termed the recessive allele. During sexual reproduction when these two alleles (gene variants from each parent) come together, it is known as a genotype. On the other hand, the physical trait that is expressed as a result of the genotype is known as the phenotype. When both alleles are identical, the genotype of referred to as heterozygous, however when one allele is different from the other, the genotype is heterozygous. Mendel proposed that for a trait to be dominant, its genotype must be either heterozygous, homozygous dominant or homozygous recessive.
Through Gregor Mendel’s conclusion of the basic principles of heredity, it is possible to predict the inherited traits of an offspring.
Artificial Pollination 