By Mollie Parkes

Gregor Mendel’s Work and Ideas

Who is Gregor Mendel?• Gregor Mendel was a German-speaking Augustinian Friar.

He is also known as ‘the father of modern genetics’.• Gregor Mendel studied the inheritance of characteristics

in pea plants. He realised that characteristics in plants are passed on from one generation to the next.

• He found that when he bred red-flowered plants with white-flowered plants, they produced red-flowered plants. When he bred these plants together they produced red offspring with some white. That’s because the allele for red flowers is dominant, while the allele for white flowers is recessive. We can see this in genetic diagrams.

Genetic Diagrams

• In genetic diagrams, the dominant allele is shown as a capital letter and the recessive allele is shown as a lower case letter.