Mendelian inheritance

Mendelian inheritance is a set of rules about genetic inheritance.

The basic rules of genetics were first discovered by a monk named Gregor Mendel in the 1850s, and published in 1866. For thousands of years, people had noticed how traits are inherited from parents to their children. However, Mendel's work was different because he did experiments on plants, and designed those experiments very carefully.^[1]

In his experiments, Mendel studied how traits were passed on in pea plants. He started his crosses with plants that bred true, and counted characters that were either/or in nature (either tall or short). He bred large numbers of plants, and expressed his results numerically. He used test crosses to reveal the presence and proportion of recessive characters.

1. ↑ Weiling F. 1991. Historical study: Johann Gregor Mendel 1822–1884. American Journal of Medical Genetics 40, 1–25