Question

How do Mendel’s experiments show that traits are inherited independently?

Answer 1

Hint: The characteristics of an individual are obtained in the process of heredity. The characters in an individual are received from the parent in which each parent contributes towards the genetic makeup of an individual.

Complete answer:
Gregor Mendel conducted different series of experiments on the pea plant that helped to deduce the basis of the hereditary rules in living organisms. He worked on how the traits or characters can be passed from one generation to the other. He studied the inheritance pattern in the common pea plant, Pisum sativum. He selected seven pairs of contrasting characters which were present in the parent plants. The plants selected by Mendel were pure breeding pea plants and they showed one form of a trait after fertilization.
During the experiment, Mendel then crossed these pure breeding lines of the pea plants. When two pairs of contrasting characters were selected during cross, it was known as dihybrid cross. The dihybrid cross was allowed to fertilize. Mendel selected pea plants with dihybrid seed characteristics such as yellow colored and round seeds and green colored wrinkled seeds. The plants with yellow colored round seeds were crossed with plants with green colored wrinkled seeds. After the cross in the F2 generation, the offspring obtained were with both the parental traits and with two recombinant phenotypes such as yellow round and green wrinkled and another recombinant phenotype with green round and yellow wrinkled. Thus, in the F2 generation all the characters were inherited and the characters were round yellow, round green, wrinkled yellow and wrinkled green.
The obtained traits or characteristics of the phenotypes obtained in the F2 generations indicates original parental combinations are separated which in the process gets inherited independently by the offspring in the next generations.

Note: Mendel selected seven pairs of contrasting characters which he used to experiment for the inheritance of characteristics in the offspring. In a dihybrid cross, Mendel selected two pairs of contrasting characters and they were crossed. The resultant cross showed the segregation of the traits of both the parents which indicated that the traits were inherited independently.