2. Gregor Mendel
The study of heredity started with the work of Gregor Mendel and his pea plant garden.
Gregor Mendel is considered to be the father of genetics.
Genetics is the study of biological inheritance patterns and variation in organisms.

3. Who was Gregor Mendel?
Gregor Mendel was born in 1822 in Austria. He grew up on his family’s farm and was able to learn a lot about flowers and fruit trees. After going to college, he joined a monastery. At the monastery, he worked in the garden where he studied how traits were passed form parent to offspring.

4. Why??
Mendel noticed that some patterns of inheritance made sense and others did not. For example, Mendel noticed that when he crossed a purple flowered pea plant with a white flowered pea plant, that all of the offspring had purple flowers. He then noticed that if he crossed two of these offspring, then one out of every four offspring had white flowers. Mendel wanted to know why.

5. What did Mendel Do?
Mendel looked at 7 traits of pea plants. Mendel crossed pea plants with two different forms of each trait (for example, smooth/wrinkled peas or yellow/green peas) to determine which traits would appear and how often. Mendel was then able to determine which of the 7 traits were dominant and which were recessive.

9. How??
The flowers of pea plants are self pollinating which means that they contain both male and female reproductive structures.
Pollen from one flower or plant can fertilize the eggs of the same plant or another plant.

10. HOW???
Mendel cut off the anthers of one flower and used the pollen from these anthers to fertilize the stamen on another plant. For example, he used the pollen from a plant that produced wrinkled seeds to fertilize the plant that produced round seeds. The stigma of the flower actually turns into seeds (peas). These seeds/peas are then planted in the ground to produce more pea plants.

11. Steps of Mendel's Experiment

12. Mendel’s Conclusions
He came to three important conclusions from these experimental results:
1.   that the inheritance of each trait is determined by "units" or "factors" that are passed on to descendents unchanged      (these units are now called genes )
2. that an individual inherits one such unit from each parent for each trait
3. that a trait may not show up in an individual but can still be passed on to the next generation.