Question

State the objective for which Mendel performed the experiment to study inheritence of two traits in garden pea.,

Answer 1

Mendel selected garden pea plants because it had the following special features:

• The garden pea plants could easily be raised, maintained and handled.
• Each pea plant produced one seed in one generation.
• It had short life cycle and, therefore it was possible to study number of generations.
• Garden pea plant had seven more distinct, easily detectable contrasting characters.
• All the contrasting traits were existing in every generation because plants had bisexual flowers and normally resorted to self pollination.
• In these bisexual plants, artificial cross fertilization could easily be achieved. It was done by removing the stamens before maturity of the female part of the flower and later dusting the pistil of this flower with the matured pollens from a desired plant.