Video
Overview of Mendelian Genetics
Gregor Mendel was a monk in the 1800s who derived the laws of inheritance from hybridization experiments on peas. Through selective cross-breeding of the pea plants Mendel discovered that certain traits showed up in the offspring that were not present in the parents. Mendel's observation from these experiments can be summarized by two principles: 1) The principle of segregation and 2) the principle of independent assortment. An allele is the different forms of a gene that can be passed onto the offspring. For the principle of segregation, for any particular trait, the pair of alleles of each parent separate and only one allele passes from each parent on to an offspring. For the principle of independent assortment, different pairs of alleles are passed to the offspring independent of each other.
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