Genetics The subject of genetics has always held a great amount of interest to me.

Its fascinating to learn how such microscopic things control the way we look. Not only that, but we look so similar to our parents, grandparents, and siblings. The study of genetics can get extremely deep, but in Mendelian genetics the focus is on inheritance and how it occurs. There were many people who knew that there was a deeper way to look at genetics, but the first person to come up with a successful theory was Gregor Mendel. Around the 1850s, Mendel was living in a monastery in Austria when he discovered how genetics worked. Before he lived there, he had studied science and math at a university in Vienna, so he was well educated (Mader). By breeding pea plants, he proved that there was indeed a pattern in the way traits are inherited. Mendel knew that if he was patient, he would see the results of different pea plants breeding and understand the way parents passed characteristics onto their offspring. It was easy for these pea plants to self-pollinate, so he let a few do so in order to have a control to compare the others to. Mendel cut off the anthers of the other plants so that he could put pollen from one plant onto the other and then examine the results (Mader). He focused on several different characteristics of the pea plants: stem length, pod shape, seed shape, seed color, flower color and pod color (Nirenberg). If he cross-pollinated a plant that had green pods with a plant that had yellow pods, three out of the four offspring would have green pods and there would be one pod that was yellow. These observations were the same in the other 5 characteristics, thereby showing that certain characteristics in parents would be passed on to the first generation in a 3:1 ratio. The characteristics that Mendel saw passed on are now known as genes. In addition to the gene, there are alleles which are a variant of a gene. He figured that on each chromosomes, there was a specific place that each allele was located. In the previously mentioned case of the pea plants, the alleles were specific to the color of the pod. Mendel knew that there were two versions for each trait, and so he called the one that showed up more often the dominant allele, and the less frequent one he called the recessive allele. Further, from this information, Mendel attributed these alleles to genotypes and phenotypes. A genotype is the alleles that an individual receives at fertilization (Mader). When the individual has one dominant and one recessive allele, the organism is heterozygous and will show the dominant allele. Likewise, if an individual has two dominant or two recessive alleles, the organism is known as homozygous. When the organism is homozygous recessive, it will show recessive trait. This is the only time that the recessive allele is shown, because at all other times, the dominant allele is expressed. The phenotype is the physical appearance of the organism, and how the alleles come through. For example, if the pod is green, the phenotype is green and the genotype is either homozygous dominant or heterozygous. There are also several parts of genetics that go further than Mendels genetics. One of these is incomplete dominance. Incomplete dominance is when the offspring shows a phenotype that expresses traits that are in between both parent. For example, if you cross one white flower and one red flower and get a pink flower, the offspring shows incomplete dominance because it is neither white nor red. Genetics can be extremely complex, but when we start with Mendels observations and work our way toward present day discoveries, we can see the way everything comes together to explain the way we inherit traits.

Works Cited Mader, Sylvia S. Concepts of Biology. Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print. Nirenberg, Marshall. "Gregor Mendel: The Father of Modern Genetics." Deciphering the Genetic Code. Office of NIH History, n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.