Question

Mention any two contrasting traits with respect to seeds in pea plants that were studied by Mendel.

Answer 1

Hint:Mandel studied the pea plant to find out which characters are passed onto the offspring. He also studied how these characters were transferred and in what frequency. He took a pair of seven contrasting characters.

Complete Answer:
Mendel is called the father of Genetics. He studied on a pea plant for seven years. He chose pea plant for his study because pea plat was self pollinating, it has a short life cycle and moreover the characters are clearly expressed.
He took seven characters- Out of these two characters are tall pea plant and short pea plant, white flower and purple flower.
Mendel’s Experiment- He crossed white and purple flowers by artificial pollination, the resultant colour was not blended. The offspring of the first generation were all purple flowers. So he concluded that purple is dominant over white. Then on further cross the F2 generation was obtained which had both purple and white flowers in the ratio 3:1.

The same happened for other characters as well. One character was dominant and the other was recessive.
He concluded those factors are the cause of heredity which causes variation in inheritance of characters. Each organism has two alleles of the same gene in which each one is inherited by each parent.
Note:From his observation in the pea plant he proposed three laws- laws of dominance and uniformity, law of segregation and law of independent assortment. The phenotypic ratio of the cross between the flowers is 3:1 and the genotypic ratio is 1:2:1.