which of the following was not a reason why mendel use pea plants to study inheritance?
Mendel dealt with seven characteristics of pea plants: plant height, fruit shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower location and color. Mendel relied on the color of the seed as an example of the pea plant and explained that when the yellow pure pea and the green pure pea were crossed, the result of this cross was always a yellow seed.
which of the following was not a reason why mendel use pea plants to study inheritance?
Mendel used the pea plant for genetic experiments to show inheritance of traits and characters. He used pea plants as they reproduced sexually and had male and female parts. They also had contrasting traits like the color, height and shape of the pea pods etc. Also the pea plant propagated easily with many offspring. That pea plants grow slowly and have very few offspring is not the real reason.
Summary of his research
Mendel used the pea plant to see where traits come from, and he used the pea plant because its flowers tend to self-pollinate with very little pollen that travels from one flower to another. It was found that peas have many separate characteristics, including:
Flower colour: white or purple.
Location of the flower: terminal or axial.
Seed colour: green or yellow.
Seed shape: wrinkled or smooth.
Fruit shape: shortened or swollen.
Fruit color: yellow or green.
Plant height: short or tall.
He noted that if the plant was left uninterrupted, tall plants always produced tall plants and green seeds produced green seeds.
As a kind of experiment, the scientist Mendel prevented some flowers from self-pollinating and carefully transferred pollen from one tall plant to another. He did the same for all the separate traits. We can only imagine his surprise when he discovered that some of the traits had disappeared. All the offspring from these crosses were tall, all the flowers were purple, and all the seeds were green. When Mendel paired plants with opposite traits, he found that all offspring (the first generation) showed one trait (tall) while the opposite trait (short stature) disappeared. From this experiment, Mendel assumed that we inherit only one trait from one parent.