MENDELIAN INHERITANCE

J.Y. Divinagracia
 TOPIC OUTLINE

• History of Mendel’s Discovery

• Terminologies used in Genetics as introduced by Mendel
• Fundamental Laws of Genetics
• Law of Segregation
• Law of Independent Assortment
• Law of Dominance
HISTORY OF MENDEL’S DISCOVERY
 GREGOR MENDEL (1822-1884)

• Augustinian monk and expert plant breeder

• Father of Genetics
• Discovered the basic principles of genetics
• lived and worked in Brünn, Austria (now Brno in the Czech
Republic)
• Examined the inheritance of clear-cut alternative traits in pea
plants, such as purple versus white flowers or yellow versus green
seeds.
• He inferred genetic laws that allowed him to make verifiable
predictions about which traits would appear, disappear, and then
reappear, and in which generations
 WHY PEAS?

• The garden pea, Pisum sativum

• easily grown in experimental gardens or in pots in a
greenhouse
• Pea flowers contain both male and female organs.
• The male organs, called anthers, produce sperm-containing
pollen, and the female organ, called the ovary, produces eggs.
• Pea reproduction is that the petals of the flower close down
tightly, preventing pollen grains from entering or leaving. This
enforces a system of self-fertilization, in which male and
female gametes from the same flower unite with each other
to produce seeds.
• Individual pea strains are highly inbred, displaying little if
any genetic variation from one generation to the next.
Because of this uniformity, we say that such strains are true-
breeding.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS
• Mendel obtained many different true-breeding varieties of peas, each distinguished by a particular characteristic.
• Mendel took advantage of these contrasting traits to determine how the characteristics of pea plants are
inherited.
• His focus on these singular differences between pea strains allowed him to study the inheritance of one trait at a time—for
example, plant height. Other biologists had attempted to follow the inheritance of many traits simultaneously, but because
the results of such experiments were complex, they were unable to discover any fundamental principles about heredity.
• Mendel succeeded where these biologists had failed because he focused his attention on contrasting differences
between plants that were otherwise the same—tall versus short, green seeds versus yellow seeds, and so forth. In
addition, he kept careful records of the experiments that he performed.
 MENDEL’S EXPERIMENTS
• First, he chose the garden pea (Pisum sativum) as his experimental
organism Peas grew well in Brünn, and with male and female organs in the
same flower, they were normally self-fertilizing.
• Second, Mendel examined the inheritance of clear-cut alternative forms of
particular traits—purple versus white flowers, yellow versus green peas.
• Third, Mendel collected and perpetuated lines of peas that bred true.
Mating within such pure-breeding lines produce offspring carrying specific
parental traits that remain constant from generation to generation.
• Fourth, being an expert plant breeder, Mendel carefully controlled his
mating, going to great lengths to ensure that the progeny he observed really
resulted from the specific fertilizations he intended.
• Fifth, Mendel worked with large numbers of plants, counted all offspring,
subjected his findings to numerical analysis, and then compared his results
with predictions based on his models.
• Finally, Mendel was a brilliant practical experimentalist. When comparing
tall and short plants, for example, he made sure that the short ones were
out of the shade of the tall ones so their growth would not be stunted.
GENETIC TERMS
 TERMS INTRODUCED BY MENDEL
• Gene • Recessive
• Genome • Parental generation
• Locus • Hybridization
• Alleles (allelomorph) • Hybrid
• Dominant Allele • Monohybrid cross
• Recessive Allele • Dihybrid cross
• Homozygous • Polyhybrid cross
• Heterozygous • Filial generation
• Hemizygous • Pure line
• Genotype • Reciprocal crosses
• Phenotype • Back Cross
• Character • Test Cross
• Dominant
FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF
GENETICS
 LAWS OF GENETICS

• As previously define, Inheritance is defined as the process of how a child receives genetic
information from the parent.
• Heredity depends on inheritance and is the reason why off springs are similar to the parents.
• Laws of Inheritance:
• Principle of Dominance
• Principle of Segregation
• Principle of Independent Assortment
MONOHYBRID CROSS
 PRINCIPLE OF DOMINANCE

• This is also called as Mendel’s first law of

inheritance.
• States that in a heterozygote, one trait will conceal the
presence of another trait for the same characteristic.
• Terms dominant and recessive refer to the
genotypic interaction of alleles in producing the
phenotype of the heterozygote.
• The alleles that are suppressed are called as the
recessive traits.
• Genetic trait is recessive, a person needs to inherit two
copies of the gene for the trait to be expressed.
• The alleles that are expressed are called as the
dominant traits.
• Needs only a copy of the trait to be inherited to be
expressed.
 PRINCIPLE OF SEGREGATION

• States that each individual that is a diploid has a

pair of alleles (copy) for a particular trait. Each
parent passes an allele at random to their
offspring resulting in a diploid organism.
• States that copies of genes separate or
segregate so that each gamete receives only one
allele.
• Physical basis of Mendel’s law of segregation is the
first division of meiosis in which the homologous
chromosomes with their different versions of
each gene are segregated into daughter
nuclei.
• As chromosomes separate into different gametes
during meiosis, the two different alleles for a
particular gene also segregate so that each
gamete acquires one of the two alleles.
DIHYBRID CROSS
 PRINCIPLE OF INDEPENDENT ASSORTMENT

• States that genes do not influence each other

with regard to the sorting of alleles into
gametes: every possible combination of alleles
for every gene is equally likely to occur.
• requires that each gamete receive either an S
allele or an s allele along with either a Y allele or a
y allele.
• assortment states that a gamete into which an s
allele sorted would be equally likely to contain
either a Y allele or a y allele.