Because of short life cycle several generations can be produced within a short period.ģ The flowers are bisexual containing both male and female parts. Peas reproduce and grow to maturity in a season (an annual plant). Pea plant is easy to grow and interbreed.Ģ. Mendel selected garden pea as his experimental material due to the following advantages:ġ. Why Mendel Selected Pea As His Experimental Material : He obtained the data from these crosses and analysed the results carefully.
The resulting hybrid plants were then crossed with each other. He crossed two pea plants having contrasting characters (for example tall and dwarf pea plants) by artificial pollination and obtained the hybrids. He studied the inheritance of seven different pairs of contrasting characters in this plant but considered only one pair at a time. Mendel performed cross breeding experiments on garden pea (Pisum sativum). They were Hugo Devries of Netherlands, Karl Correns from Germany and Eric Von Tshermak of Austria. Unfortunately, his out-standing contributions failed to attract the attention of the scientific world of that time and remained unknown till 1900 when his papers were rediscovered by three different scientists from three different countries of Europe, while working independently on heredity in plants. Mendel conducted his historic experiments with garden pea (Pisum sativum) in the monastery garden for about nine years (1856-1864) and published his results in a less known journal-The Annual proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brunn in 1865. However, these workers could not give a numerical treatment to their results as Mendel did in 1866 and hence could not understand the mechanism of inheritance. His view was accepted by the then established scientists like Gartner (1772-1850), Naudin (1815-1899) and Darwin (1809-1882). Kolreuter further stated that reciprocal crosses give similar results. Kolreuter (1733-1806), a German botanist performed hybridization experiments in tobacco and demonstrated that the hybrids may resemble one or other parent or may be intermediate between the two. His experiments were in fact the extension and development of hybridization experiments on pea conducted by earlier workers like Knight (1799) and Goss (1824).
During this long period he conducted his famous garden pea experiments in the monastery garden. In 1854 Mendel again took up the profession of a teacher and continued there for fourteen years. This enabled him to design and analyse precise experimental work which he conducted at the monastery.
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