Gregor Mendel, born as Johann Mendel, was an Austrian scientist and monk hailed as the “Father of modern genetics” for his pioneering research in the field of heredity. He was a monk in Augustinian Abbey of St Thomas in Brno where he worked as a teacher. He had a deep interest in botany which led him to conduct experiments on pea plants. Inspired by the work of a biologist named Franz Unger, he began his experiments in the monastery’s sprawling gardens. Over the course of his study he observed that there were seven characteristics in the pea plants, and two forms of each characteristic. These characteristics included seed shape and pod shape in addition to plant height and seed colour. Mendel observed that the seven characteristics he had recognized remained consistent over generations in purebred plants. For eight years, he carefully crossbred and grew thousands of pea plants, and patiently analyzed and compared the plants and seeds for difference in colour and size of the seeds, and variations in length of the plants. He took various precautions to prevent the accidental pollination of the flowers which could have altered the results of the experiments. His meticulous study and the resultant observations led to what is today known as Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance.
On this day 200 years ago, Johann Mendel was born. He would come to be known as Gregor (the religious name he received upon entering St. Thomas's Abbey in Austria-Hungary as an Augustinian Friar) and later as the "father of modern genetics." Mendel studied math, physics, and eventually botany in...
The friar’s experiments laid the groundwork for genetics — and his understated approach to his work is inspirational. You have full access to this article via your institution. Genetics is fiendishly complex. We know this from decades of molecular biology, from the resulting studies on the sequencing and...
Born July 20th, 1822, in today's Czech Republic, Gregor Mendel was a monk and a teacher of mathematics and natural sciences, best known for discovering the basic principles of heredity. Through cross-breeding pea plants grown in his monastery, Mendel deciphered how certain traits, like the shape of the peas and color of the flowers, passed from one generation to the next. While his findings were largely ignored at the time, they were rediscovered and accepted decades later, and Mendel is now celebrated as the "father of modern genetics". Mendel's laws of inheritance, along with the discovery of DNA and genes, were eventually part of the "modern synthesis" of Darwin's evolutionary theory.
Developed at a time when the basic molecular and cellular elements of inheritance were yet to be identified, the concepts of dominance and recessiveness are at the core of the connection between genotype and phenotype in diploid organisms. On the occasion of Gregor Mendel's 200th birthday, we reflect on the history of the terms dominant and recessive, and their current use in medical genetics.
