Mendel died in obscurity, but is now hailed as the father of genetics. What did he discover?

In today's biological community, everyone knows the name Gregor Mendel, but many people may not know that this father of genetics was still unknown when he died, and was even regarded as a layman in the biological community. So what did this great biologist discover in his research?

Mendel was born in a small village in the Austrian Empire. Mendel's family was poor when he was young. After being forced to drop out of school, he came to a monastery to serve as a priest. Due to his outstanding performance during his tenure, Mendel was sponsored by the abbot of the monastery and was able to enter the university again to study mathematics, physics and biology.

After graduation, Mendel returned to the monastery and began to use a vegetable garden in the monastery to conduct his biological research, and the object of his research was peas.

Hybridization is a very good way to study the genetic laws of plants, and peas are one of the most convenient objects for hybridization research. Hybridization is relative to self-pollination. We know that there are stamens and pistils in the flowers of plants. When the pollen of the stamens falls into the pistil, pollination is completed, which is called self-pollination. In contrast, if the pollen of the stamens falls into the pistil of another flower through the medium of wind or insects, pollination can also be completed, and this situation is called hybridization.

The difference between selfing and hybridization is that the genetic information of selfing comes entirely from oneself, while the hybridization process brings together different genetic information.

From this we can also see how difficult hybrid rice is. Usually, there are hundreds of rice grains on a rice plant, and each rice grain is formed by the pollination of a single small flower, which makes large-scale artificial pollination and hybridization almost impossible. Compared with rice, hybrid peas are much easier, because the stamens of peas are tightly wrapped by the flowers and will not be contaminated. It is very convenient to remove the stamens and inject pollen from another flower into them.

Mendel chose peas not only because of the convenience of artificial hybridization, but also because the characteristics of peas are obvious and easy to observe.

What are traits? For example, tall peas and dwarf peas, round peas and wrinkled peas, etc. At first, Mendel crossed tall peas with dwarf peas, and all the offspring were tall peas. Then he let these tall peas self-pollinate, and the offspring produced included tall peas and dwarf peas. Why is this? Mendel began to think about the reason, and soon he found that there was a fixed ratio of tall peas to dwarf peas in three generations, 3:1.

Mendel thought deeply about the experimental results and finally discovered the law behind them.

Mendel believed that the genetic factors of organisms appear in pairs, among which there are dominant factors and recessive factors. For example, tall stems are dominant, while short stems are recessive. When dominant meets dominant, the offspring will show dominant characteristics. When dominant meets recessive, the offspring will still show dominant characteristics. Only when recessive factors are combined with recessive factors, the offspring will show recessive characteristics. At the beginning, Mendel used "dominant dominant" and "recessive recessive" hybridization, and the offspring produced were "dominant recessive", so they were all tall stems. Self-pollination of "dominant recessive" will produce four combinations, namely "dominant dominant", "dominant recessive", "recessive dominant", and "recessive recessive". The first three will show dominant, and the last one will show recessive, which is exactly 3:1.

Mendel wrote up his discovery as a paper, which later became the first law of genetics.

Unfortunately, Mendel's paper was hardly taken seriously by anyone, and biologists ignored his findings, to the point that Mendel himself began to doubt the flaws in his theory. He was still considered a layman in biology until his death. It was not until 20 years later that people began to gradually realize the importance of Mendel's research. Perhaps this is enough for a scientist, but what I want to say is that breaking down prejudice is often more difficult than digging out the laws of nature.

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