Mr. Mendel and his Peas
by C. Williams

Gregor Johann Mendel, an Austrian monk, wrote a paper in 1865 about his experiments with selective cultivation of sweet peas. He found that the blossoms of the pea plants came in two basic colors, red and white.

However, when a pea plant with white flowers was pollinated (crossed) with a plant that had red flowers, the resulting new plants had only red flowers.

When two of the plants from this first generation offspring (known as F1) with red flowers were cross-pollinated with each other... something else happened...

a few of the second generation pea plants (known as F2) had white flowers!

Gregor wanted to know why, and studied the problem and came up with a theory on that. In the end, Gregor Mendel also developed a simple charting system, as well as some hypothetical "laws" that helped to more clearly show the basic principles of inheritance (often referred to as "Mendelian Inheritance" or "Mendel's Laws" now). Gregor has been credited with making the single greatest contribution to the study of heredity, and the founding of the science of Genetics.

Mendel published the results of his studies in 1866, but they were not noticed by the scientific community until 1900.

One of Mendel's basic hypotheses (which was later proven), is that each parent contributed one "allele" to the new offspring . . . one half of the genetic information needed to determine what color the flower was going to be. He selectively cultivated the peas to prove his ideas right... at least in relation to the colors of flowers in peas.

But since you didn't come here to learn about peas, we'll relate this back to horses. The Grey gene in horses works the same way as Gregor Mendel's original pea studies.

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