AGB 121: Principles of Animal Genetics and Population Genetics (2+1)

MENDEL

• Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter (1733-1806) was one of the first botanists to systematically make and test hybrids.
• Koelreuter's work was extended by Carl Friedrich von Gaertner (1772-1850). In the 1860s, Gregor Mendel carried out a remarkable series of hybridization experiments and systematically analyzed the results of his tests.
• Gregor Johann Mendel (1822–1884) Austrian botanist, teacher, Augustinian monk and is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants, the first to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics, in what came to be called Mendelism.
  • The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century.
  • Its rediscovery prompted the foundation of the discipline of genetics.
• Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants (i.e. Pisum sativum ).
  • Mendel read his paper, "Experiments on Plant Hybridization", at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brunn in Moravia in 1865.
  • When Mendel's paper was published in 1866 in Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brunn, it had little impact and was cited about three times over the next thirty-five years.