Mendel and his peas
A trait is characteristic that an organism can pass on to it's offspring.
An organism's heredity is the set of traits it receives from its parents
Mendel wanted to find out why traits disappeared and appeared again.
We call different forms of the same trait alleles
Mendel showed us that the dominant alleles (purple flower) appears in peas more often and seems to "hide" the other form (white flower)
A recessive allele is the form of a gene that gets hidden if the dominant allele is present
If both alleles for flower color get passed to the offspring, then the dominant allele that causes purple flowers to hide the recessive allele.
No white flowers show up in the next generation.
An organisms phenotype is a form of a trait is visible
For a flower color, a pea plant can show a phenotype of purple or white flowers
Mendel noticed that a trait from the parent pea plant did not always how up in the offspring (1st generation)
Gregor Mendel is known as the father of genetics. He wanted to find out traits are passed down. He did an experiment with pea plants because they grow faster.
Genetics is the study of heredity