Introduction to Mendel's Experiments

in this video, we're going to begin our introduction to Mendel's experiments. And so Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk and scientists that helped discover the fundamentals of genetics by using he plants as a model organism. And so model organisms are non human organisms that air studied to make discoveries and gain insights into other organisms. And so, although Gregor Mendel was studying pea plants, Ah, lot of the discoveries that he made can still be applied to other organisms, including humans. Now Gregor Mendel used the term character to define an inherited feature that varies among individual organisms. And so, for example, among individual pea plant organisms. The plant height and the flower color are these inherited features that will vary amongst these organisms, and so these plant height and flower color would be examples of characters now. Gregor Mendel also used the term traits to describe different variants of specific characters. So, for example, for the character plant height, the traits would be either short plants or tall plants. Those would be different traits of the character plant height and for the character flower color. The different traits would be white flowers or purple flowers, and so you can see that the character is going to describe a broader feature, whereas the trait is going to describe a mawr specific variant of a specific character. And so let's take a look at our example down below to get a better understanding of the differences between characters and traits and so you can see that mental USPI plants to study genetics. And over here you can see that Johann Gregor Mendel live from 22 to 18 84 and he is well known as the father of genetics. And so the uh, model organism that Gregor Mendel used was the pea plant itself. And so you can see here in blue, we're showing you the characters of the pea plants. For example, plant height, flower color, P color and Peapod shape are all examples of characters for these peop lance and then notice down below at the bottom. What we're showing you are the specific traits for each of these characters, and so you can see that these are the traits of the characters. So, for example, for the character plant height, the traits would be either the short or the tall plants for flower color the trait would be white or purple. For P color character, the trait would be green or yellow peace. And then for Peapod shaped character, the traits would be straight or bumpy. And so this year concludes our introduction to Gregor Mendel's experiments using pea plants to study genetics. And as we move forward in our course, we're going to continue to talk Mawr and Mawr about Gregor Mendel's experiments and discoveries, so I'll see you all in our next video.

So why did Gregor Mendel decide to use pea plants as his model organism to study inheritance and genetics? Well, it turns out that mental discovered that P plants were the ideal model organism for studying inheritance and genetics for multiple reasons. And we've got five of these reasons listed down below here in our image. And so the very first reason that Gregor Mendel chose pea plants as his model organism is because P plants are easy to cultivate or grow or maintain now. The second reason that Gregor Mendel chose pea plants is because P plants grow relatively quickly, and he's able to get multiple generations and a relatively short period of time now. The third reason that Gregor Mendel chose pea plants is because P plants produce multiple offspring, and the fourth reason is because P plants have very have many inheritable traits or many traits that they can pass on from generation to generation. And the fifth and final reason why Gregor Mendel chose pea plants is because they are easy to control. It's easy to control P plant fertilization or, in other words, it's very easy to control which pea plants he's going to mate. with each other. Also, pea plants have this special ability to self fertilized, meaning that he can use the same pea plant to create multiple generations. And so we'll get to talk Mawr and Maura about self fertilization and cross fertilization later in our course as we move forward. And we'll also continue to talk Maura Maura about Mendel's experiments and his discoveries as we move forward, So I'll see you all in our next video.