Gregor Mendel – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gregor Johann Mendel (20 July 1822[1] 6 January 1884) was a German-speaking Silesian[2][3] scientist and Augustinian friar who gained posthumous fame as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for centuries that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.

Mendel worked with seven characteristics of pea plants: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. With seed color, he showed that when a yellow pea and a green pea were bred together their offspring plant was always yellow. However, in the next generation of plants, the green peas reappeared at a ratio of 1:3. To explain this phenomenon, Mendel coined the terms recessive and dominant in reference to certain traits. (In the preceding example, green peas are recessive and yellow peas are dominant.) He published his work in 1866, demonstrating the actions of invisible factorsnow called genesin providing for visible traits in predictable ways.

The profound significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century (more than three decades later) with the independent rediscovery of these laws.[4]Erich von Tschermak, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and William Jasper Spillman independently verified several of Mendel's experimental findings, ushering in the modern age of genetics.

Johann Mendel was born into an ethnic German family in Heinzendorf bei Odrau, Moravian-Silesian border, Austrian Empire (now Hynice, Czech Republic). (He was given the name Gregor when he joined the Augustinian friars.) He was the son of Anton and Rosine (Schwirtlich) Mendel, and had one older sister, Veronika, and one younger, Theresia. They lived and worked on a farm which had been owned by the Mendel family for at least 130 years.[6] During his childhood, Mendel worked as a gardener and studied beekeeping. Later, as a young man, he attended gymnasium in Opava. He had to take four months off during his gymnasium studies due to illness. From 1840 to 1843, he studied practical and theoretical philosophy and physics at the University of Olomouc Faculty of Philosophy, taking another year off because of illness. He also struggled financially to pay for his studies and Theresia gave him her dowry. Later he helped support her three sons, two of whom became doctors. He became a friar because it enabled him to obtain an education without having to pay for it himself.

When Mendel entered the Faculty of Philosophy, the Department of Natural History and Agriculture was headed by Johann Karl Nestler who conducted extensive research of hereditary traits of plants and animals, especially sheep. Upon recommendation of his physics teacher Friedrich Franz,[8] Mendel entered the Augustinian St Thomas's Abbey and began his training as a priest. Born Johann Mendel, he took the name Gregor upon entering religious life. Mendel worked as a substitute high school teacher. In 1850 he failed the oral part, the last of three parts, of his exams to become a certified high school teacher. In 1851 he was sent to the University of Vienna to study under the sponsorship of Abbot C. F. Napp so that he could get more formal education. At Vienna, his professor of physics was Christian Doppler.[10] Mendel returned to his abbey in 1853 as a teacher, principally of physics. In 1856 he took the exam to become a certified teacher and again failed the oral part.In 1867 he replaced Napp as abbot of the monastery.[11]

Mendel began his studies on heredity using mice. He was at St. Thomas's Abbey but his bishop did not like one of his friar studying animal sex, so Mendel switched to plants. Mendel also bred bees in a bee house that was built for him, using bee hives that he designed.[13] He also studied astronomy and meteorology,[11] founding the 'Austrian Meteorological Society' in 1865.[10] The majority of his published works were related to meteorology.[10]

Gregor Mendel, who is known as the "father of modern genetics", was inspired by both his professors at the University of Olomouc (Friedrich Franz & Johann Karl Nestler) and his colleagues at the monastery (e.g., Franz Diebl) to study variation in plants, and he conducted his study in the monastery's 2 hectares (4.9 acres) experimental garden,[14] which was originally planted by Napp in 1830.[11] Unlike Nestler, who studied hereditary traits in sheep, Mendel focused on plants. After initial experiments with pea plants, Mendel settled on studying seven traits that seemed to inherit independently of other traits: seed shape, flower color, seed coat tint, pod shape, unripe pod color, flower location, and plant height. He first focused on seed shape, which was either angular or round. Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants (i.e., Pisum sativum). This study showed that one in four pea plants had purebred recessive alleles, two out of four were hybrid and one out of four were purebred dominant. His experiments led him to make two generalizations, the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, which later came to be known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.

Mendel presented his paper, Versuche ber Pflanzenhybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization), at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno in Moravia on 8 February and 8 March 1865. It was received favorably and generated reports in several local newspapers.[17] When Mendel's paper was published in 1866 in Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereins Brnn,[18] it was seen as essentially about hybridization rather than inheritance and had little impact and was cited about three times over the next thirty-five years. Notably, Charles Darwin was unaware of Mendel's paper, according to Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. His paper was criticized at the time, but is now considered a seminal work.

After completing his work with peas, Mendel turned to experimenting with honeybees to extend his work to animals. He produced a hybrid strain (so vicious they were destroyed) but failed to generate a clear picture of their heredity because of the difficulties in controlling mating behaviours of queen bees.[dubious discuss] He also described novel plant species, and these are denoted with the botanical author abbreviation "Mendel".

After he was elevated as abbot in 1868, his scientific work largely ended, as Mendel became consumed with his increased administrative responsibilities, especially a dispute with the civil government over their attempt to impose special taxes on religious institutions.[19] Mendel died on 6 January 1884, at the age of 61, in Brno, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic), from chronic nephritis. Czech composer Leo Janek played the organ at his funeral. After his death, the succeeding abbot burned all papers in Mendel's collection, to mark an end to the disputes over taxation.[20]

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