10 Facts About Mendelian inheritance

Mendelian inheritance is a type of biological inheritance that follows the principles originally proposed by Gregor Mendel in 1865 and 1866, re-discovered in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, and popularized by William Bateson.

Principles of Mendelian inheritance were named for and first derived by Gregor Johann Mendel, a nineteenth-century Moravian monk who formulated his ideas after conducting simple hybridisation experiments with pea plants he had planted in the garden of his monastery.

Mendelian inheritance described his experiments in a two-part paper, Versuche uber Pflanzen-Hybriden, that he presented to the Natural History Society of Brno on 8 February and 8 March 1865, and which was published in 1866.

However, later work by biologists and statisticians such as Ronald Fisher showed that if multiple Mendelian inheritance factors were involved in the expression of an individual trait, they could produce the diverse results observed, and thus showed that Mendelian inheritance genetics is compatible with natural selection.

Mendelian inheritance only measured discrete characteristics, such as color, shape, and position of the seeds, rather than quantitatively variable characteristics.

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Mendelian inheritance expressed his results numerically and subjected them to statistical analysis.

Mendelian inheritance had the foresight to follow several successive generations of pea plants and record their variations.

Mendelian inheritance then conceived the idea of heredity units, which he called hereditary "factors".

Principle of dominant Mendelian inheritance discovered by Mendel states that in a heterozygote the dominant allele will cause the recessive allele to be "masked": that is, not expressed in the phenotype.

Mendelian trait is one whose inheritance follows Mendel's principles—namely, the trait depends only on a single locus, whose alleles are either dominant or recessive.