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OLogy Cards > Gregor Mendel

OLOGY CARD 118
Series: Ologist

Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel not only ate his peas, he used them to figure out how genes are passed from generation to generation. In the 1800s, this Austrian monk experimented with 22 kinds of pea plants. Mendel took careful notes about the pea plants and analyzed the results. He discovered the rules for how genetics works. Who knows what you could do if you ate your peas!

Date of Birth: July 22, 1822
Died: January 6, 1884
Claim to fame: discovered the basic laws of genetics through experiments with pea plants
Known for: breeding thousands of pea plants and observing how parent plants' characteristics are passed on from generation to generation
Significance: Mendel's experiments started the science of genetics

During his experiments, how many pea plants did Mendel use?

28

2,800

28,000

Correct!

During his genetics experiments, Mendel made 287 crosses between 70 different types of pea plants. To do this, he needed about 28,000 pea plants.

open pea pod with peas inside

Why did Gregor Mendel choose pea plants to study heredity?

pea plants are fun to play with

pea plants make delicious soup

pea plants come in many varieties

Correct!

Pea plants are useful for studying heredity because they reproduce quickly and come in lots of varieties.

According to Mendel's experiments, if you cross a tall pea plant with a short one, some of the pea "children" will be of medium height.

Fact
OR
Fiction
?

Fiction

Mendel discovered that pea "children" are either short OR tall, not in-between. This is because the tallness gene is dominant over the dwarf gene.

As soon as Mendel's report on plant genetics was published in 1865, he became a world-famous scientist.

Fact
OR
Fiction
?

Fiction

When Mendel was alive, his research went mostly unnoticed. But in 1900, 16 years after he died, several scientists rediscovered his work.

Image credits: main image, © AMNH/Kelvin Chan; stumper, © AMNH.

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