Tuesday, September 16, 2008

What did Mendel learn from his pea plant experiments?


Mendel began to breed different pea plants together and record his findings. He made many observations about the various traits he saw. For example, he discovered that when he crossed pure homozygous Tall plants (TT) with short plants (tt) all of the offspring were heterozygous Tall (Tt).

TT x tt=Tt

He defined dominant traits as those that were expressed, "the ones we can see". Indicated by a capital letter. In this example T=Tall.

Recessive traits are not expressed or masked. Indicated by a lower case letter. In this example t=short.

Now really have some fun with Mendel!!!!!
Visit this site and plant your own garden. See if you can tell what type of pea plants you will grow. If you have trouble starting the lab scroll down to the directory and start there.

http://www2.edc.org/weblabs/mendel/mendelInstructions.html

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great Job, Mrs. Shikora! =) Keep up the good work and teach those children about the peas! =)