Gregor Mandel Influences

Gregor Mandel went through a very long process before discovering that plants had sexes, and the fundamentals of inheritance. Mandel had his own garden where he grew his peas and did his research. He was greatly influence by Joseph Koelreuter, by the way he thought about heredity. This inspiration allowed him to have the curiosity to further pursue his work. Mandel had three specific ideas that also influence his work, they were: That fertilizing the hybrid plants would seem to create a new species. Also, that he couldn’t fully explain why the hybrids created new hybrids. Lastly, he knew that there was some mechanism which involved male and female. During his experiments of crossbreeding he observed and was able to conclude that that there were dominant and recessive factors which determined what the offspring of two peas would

Mandel studied the results of many hybrid plants trying to understand what caused certain characteristics of the offspring to be more dominant over other characteristics. He tested this many times observing the size of the seeds, to the color, to the stem length. Mandel did not fully understand what these “factors” really were, but that they were passed down from parent to offspring. It was later discovered that these “factors” were what we now know as genes. The whole scientific process that Gregor Mandel took allowed him to discover the connections between cross pollination and their offspring’s, and how the characteristics of the fertilized plants would change in the offspring. In 1866 Mandel then published his work, but it wasn’t ‘rediscovered’ until 1990 and used as the foundation of the field of