The main importance of Mendel's works it is that his experiments have been central to modern genetics. The famous "Mendelian Laws" managed to explain the transmission of genetic inheritance from parents to children.
Thanks to Mendel, today it is possible to predict the characteristics that children will adopt from their parents, namely probabilities of contracting diseases and even mental capacities and natural talents.
Although his experiments began humbly by working crosses with simple pea plants, they later laid the foundations for the emergence of genetics, a field of study dedicated to studying heredity, the process through which parents transmit characters to their children..
Gregor Mendel, Austrian monk and botanist, was born in 1822 to dedicate his life to religion, science and mathematics.
He is considered the father of genetics after publishing his famous work Essay on plant hybrids in 1866, and was the first person to explain how human beings are the result of the joint action of paternal and maternal genes.
In addition, he discovered how genes are transmitted between generations and pointed the way for future geneticists and biologists, who even today continue to put their experiments into practice..
With his work he made known the main terms that genetics uses today, such as genes, genotype and phenotype, mainly.
Thanks to its studies, genetics has made it possible to know the origin of various diseases and to analyze chromosomes and genes more thoroughly under various branches such as: classical, molecular, evolutionary, quantitative genetics and cytogenetics..
The objective of the laws developed by Mendel was to study how certain characters or hereditary factors are transmitted from one generation to another. That is why, between the years 1856 to 1865, he decided to carry out a series of experiments.
Their work consisted of crossing varieties of pea plants taking into consideration their specific traits such as: color and location of the plant's flowers, shape and color of the pea pods, shape and color of the seeds and length of the stem of the peas. plants.
Mendel used the pea Pisum Sativum, because it was found easily and in large quantities; And also, the interesting thing about these plants was that when they were left to their own devices, they crossed and pollinated each other.
The method used consisted of transferring pollen from the stamen of a plant to the pistil of another type of plant..
Mendel combined a red-flowered pea plant with a white-flowered pea plant in order to see what resulted from the crossing. To later start experiments with that generation resulting from the mixture.
As an example, Mendel took different plants and built different versions of the well-known family trees to study what happened to these characters when they crossed.
Called "Law of dominant characters or the uniformity of hybrids." Using this law, Mendel discovered that if a line of smooth-seeded peas was crossed with another line of rough-seeded peas, the individuals that were born from that first generation were uniform and resembled the smooth-seeded.
When obtaining this result, he understood that when a pure species is crossed with another, the offspring of that first filial generation will be the same in their genotype and phenotypically more similar to the carrier of the dominant allele or gene, in this case the smooth seed..
A more common example: if the mother has black eyes and the father blue eyes, 100% of their children will come out with black eyes similar to the mother, because they are the dominant character..
This law states that "when two purebred individuals are crossed, the resulting hybrids are all the same." As shown in the image, understanding the color yellow as the dominant gene.
Called "Law of segregation". Mendel discovered that by planting the hybrids from the first generation and fertilizing each other, a second generation was obtained that turned out to be mostly smooth and a quarter rough..
Hence, Mendel wondered how it could be possible that the characters of the second generation had features, such as rough, that their smooth-seeded parents did not possess.?
The answer is found in the statement of the second law: "Certain individuals are capable of transmitting a character even though it is not manifested in them".
A common example following the Mendelian experiment: a black-eyed mother crosses paths with a blue-eyed father, resulting in children who will have 100% black eyes.
If these children (brothers among them) crossed, the result would be that the majority would have black eyes and a quarter blue.
This explains how in families, grandchildren have characteristics of their grandparents and not only of their parents. In the case represented in the image, the same thing happens.
Also known as "Law of the independence of characters." Postulates that genes for different characters are inherited independently.
Hence, during the formation of gametes, the segregation and distribution of hereditary traits originates independently of each other..
For this reason, if two varieties have two or more different characteristics between them, each of them will be transmitted independently of the others. As can be seen in the image.
Mendel was the first to discover the existence of what we know today as "genes." Defining them as the biological unit responsible for the transmission of genetic traits.
They are the genes, the hereditary units that control the characters present in living beings.
Considered as each of the different alternative forms that the same gene can present.
The alleles are made up of a dominant gene and a recessive one. And, the first will manifest itself to a greater extent than the second.
Mendel found that all organisms have two copies of each gene, and if these copies are purebred, that is, identical, the organism is homozygous.
Whereas, if the copies are different, the organism is heterozygous..
With his discoveries, Mendel revealed that the inheritance present in every individual will be marked by two factors:
2. And, the phenotype, namely all the external manifestations of the genotype such as: morphology, physiology and behavior of the individual.
Mendel's experiments made it possible to discover the so-called “Mendelian diseases or defects”, those diseases that are produced by the mutation of a single gene.
These mutations are capable of altering the function of the protein encoded by the gene, hence the protein is not produced, does not function properly or is expressed inappropriately..
These genetic variants produce a large number of defects or rare diseases such as sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis and hemophilia, among the most common.
Thanks to its initial discoveries, today different inherited diseases and chromosomal abnormalities have been discovered.
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