Question

When Mendel worked with pea plants, he took the parent plants to be with pure homozygous chromosomes, but it can be that they were not homozygous. How was he sure whether it is homozygous (it could have been heterozygous too)??

Answer 1

by performing pollination of pea plants through several generations mendel was able to develop homozygous variety and also phenotypic characters helped him in identyfying homozygous parents. To ensure pollination by desired plants only techniques like emasculation are used.

Emasculation is a process in which anthers are manually removed or excised from a bisexual flower. This helps in pollinating the stigma of a flower with desired pollen from other variety and protecting it with some mechanical barrier such as covering the flower with a polyethylene bag to avoid unnecessary pollination.